Shame

Passages

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

Page 81 of 267 · 20 per page

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

  Our last night of work was the first night we could drink on campus: The students had left for the summer and the halls and dorm rooms were empty for the first time in six weeks. A night was planned, starting at a colleague’s dorm and stopping by six others that housed us before ending up at the town bar. The crawl was themed, so we spent the day at the Goodwill crafting our costumes. We spent our last paychecks on the alcohol and I remember that liquor store and that bottle of wine so well. I remember holding it by its neck as I walked from my friend’s room to the first party of the night. I remember holding it by my side for group photos. And I remember vomiting it back up the next morning. We got to the first party at eight. By 8:30 my night was over; I never made it to the bar. The next morning I lay on the floor of a shower stall of that first dorm under a stream of water. The hot water was turned all the way up, but it felt like ice on my skin. I didn’t know how many hours I had been on that floor. I was shaking. My underwear was on the other side of the room. I was so concerned with cleaning up where I had been sick. I took off my soaking wet clothes and tried to stop shaking. I wrapped a towel around myself. It was barely the size of my torso. In the mirror I saw scratch marks on my back and bruises on my chest (I wouldn’t notice the bruises on my thighs until later). I pulled my shirt back on to cover them. It was heavy and made me shake harder than before. I walked back to my building and called a security guard to let me in because I couldn’t find my key in that bathroom. (My friend would return my purse later that day. “You left this behind when you left with. . . .” She trailed off with a teasing knowingness suggesting she did not know at all.) I didn’t meet the security guard’s eyes. I knew he was thinking that I had too much to drink last night—that I had let this happen. For years, that night was my fault. I knew what rape was. I knew what consent was. I knew about first- and second-wave feminism. I knew queer theory. But I swallowed the blame like that bottle of red wine and repeated to myself the lies that would run on loop for years to come. You have only yourself to blame. It was not that bad. You’re okay. You’re alive. At least you don’t remember it all. The bruises are gone. You can forget about it. No one ever has to know. Even now, these lies taste familiar, comfortable, in a way that the words survivor and victim never have. III.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  212.“Marriage to him would have meant a life” : Ibid., p. 247.“When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression” : Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), p. 205.“She had been a spirited, adventurous young woman” : Gloria Steinem, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It). Accessed as a PDF online: https://englishiva1011.pbworks.com/f/RUTHSONG.PDF .“The family must have watched this energetic, fun-loving, book-loving woman” : Ibid.“The world still missed a unique person named Ruth” : Ibid.Essie typed out many of Judy’s manuscripts over the years : Sarah Larson, “Judy Blume’s Unfinished Endings,” The New Yorker , April 25, 2023. Accessed online: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/judy-blumes-unfinished-endings .“When they ask how she knows all those things” : Judy Blume, Wifey, Introduction, p. xii.Chapter Sixteen Divorce“I don’t think we could have survived two more years together” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , p. 125.Meanwhile, publicists at Blume’s paperback publisher, Dell : Email with Sarah Gallick, June 22, 2022.He handled it “brilliantly,” Blume said : V.C. Chickering, “A Judy Blume Interview from the Bust Archives,” Bust , February 12, 2015, originally published in the 1997 Spring/Summer issue. Accessed online: https://bust.com/tbt-a-very-special-judy-blume-exclusive-from-our-bust-vault/ .“Adult readers will enjoy this light romance” : Library Journal , September 1, 1978.The reviewer from the LA Times praised Blume’s abilities : Marilyn Murray Willison, “Judy Blume Writes One for the Grown-Ups,” Los Angeles Times , September 24, 1978, p. K8.“a bawdy account of a suburban wife’s rebellion” : Eric Pace, “Fictional Heroines with a Will,” New York Times , November 22, 1979.Reviewer Sue Isaacs suggested, in a culturally prescient takedown : Sue Isaacs, “Hello Grown-Ups, It’s Me Judy,” Washington Post , October 8, 1978, p. E5. Newsday attributed it to a librarian in Garden City, New York : David Behrens, “Sugar—And a Little Spice,” Newsday , March 1, 1978, p. 1A.“I cringe, even today, thinking of that article” : Judy Blume, Wifey (New York: Berkley Books, 1978), Introduction, p. xi.“We have a very nice family life” : Mary Daniels, “Preteen Readers Find Their Boswell in Blume,” Chicago Tribune , June 23, 1978, p. D3.by November 1979, there were a reported three million copies : Eric Pace, “Fictional Heroines with a Will,” New York Times , November 22, 1979.“I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody” : Peter Gorner, “Tempo: The Giddy/Sad, Flighty/Solid Life of Judy Blume,” Chicago Tribune , March 15, 1985, p. D1.“My breasts were growing or else they were just fat” : Judy Blume, Just as Long as We’re Together (New York: Orchard Books, 1987), p. 190.“I hate not knowing what’s going to happen!” : Ibid., p. 263.Most of the kids who contacted Judy received a mailer in return : Mailer viewed at the Elizabeth Public Library’s main branch, June 28, 2022.“Could you sort of be a second mother to me and tell me the facts of life?” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , p.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  hands on me and lead me to prison, whereunto I wa. willingly obedient ; and as we came to the mouth of our lane all the city gathered together in a thick throng and followed me, and although I looked always on the ground, nay, even to the very pit of death for misery, yet sometimes I cast my head aside, and marvelled greatly that amongst so many thousand people there was not one but laughed exceedingly. Finally, when they had brought me through all the streets of the city, and to every nook and corner, in manner of those as go in procession and do sacrifice to mitigate the ire of the gods, they placed me in the judgement-hall before the seat of the judges: and after that the magistrates had taken their seat on a high stage, and the crier had commanded all men to keep silence, the people instantly cried out with one voice and desired the judges to give sentence in the great theatre by reason of the great multitude that was there, whereby they were in danger of stifling. And behold they ran and very quickly filled the whole pit of the theatre, and the press of people increased still; some climbed to the top of the house, some got upon the beams, some hung from the images, and some thrust in their heads through the windows and ceilings, little regarding the dangers they were in, so they might see me. Then the officers brought me forth openly into the middle of the place like some victim, that every man might behold me, and made me to stand in the midst of the stage. And after that the crier had made an “Oyez” and willed all such as would bring any evidence against me should come forth, there stepped out an old man with an hour-glass of water in his hand, wherein, through a small hole like to a funnel, the water dropped softly, that he might have liberty : 103 LUCIUS APULEIUS et ad dicendi spatium vasculo quodam in vicem coli graciliter fistulato ac per hoe guttatim defluo infusa aqua, populum sic adorat :

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was going out on a date with Helen Paper and I had to calm myself by then because the evening would surely be quicksilver small talk and ten different kinds of smile and there would be hands linking and parting as in a square dance you had to be very subtle to hear called, subtle and calm. I wanted so badly to be popular, to have the others look back as I ran to catch up, then to walk with my left hand around his waist, the right around hers, her long hair blown back on my shoulder, pooling there for a moment in festive intimacy, a sort of gold epaulet of the secret order of joy. I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds, even the construction workers on the site next door, and delivering me up to the admonishing black head of the fan on the floor slowly shaking from left to right, right to left to signal its tedious repetition of no, no, no, and to exhale the faintly irritating vacillations of its breath. No, no, no—those were the words I repeated to myself, not with force but as a Jesus prayer of listless grief. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed Venetian blinds—oh, if that were the Devil I would fear him. That’s what Being Popular seemed to promise, a deliverance from the humiliation of daily life, its geological torpor, the dailiness that rusts the blade of resolve and rots the stage curtain, that fades all colors and returns all fields to pasture. Being popular was equivalent to becoming a character, perhaps even a person, since if to be is to be perceived, then to be perceived by many eyes and with envy, interest, respect or affection is to exist more densely, more articulately, every last detail minutely observed and thereby richly rendered. I knew that my sister wasn’t popular, at least not at school. She sat at home night after night and no matter how she styled her hair or wore her skirts she looked unliked, dowdy with dislike. Our mother told us she’d been popular as a girl, but she had grown up on a farm where families did everything together.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I had never been bad before. Of course I’d been intolerably wicked or maybe just sick in sleeping with other boys and men, but those transgressions were secret and solitary. Now at last I, who’d always been considered obedient, even docile, was rubbing shoulders with guys who were about to flunk out, who got drunk and totaled cars, who knocked up girls, who got into fistfights with their dads, who stole motorcycles and went off on joy rides, who had created such chaos at home they’d been banished to Eton. These boys accepted anyone at all so long as he was a smoker and a failure. Here came the hell raisers who sneaked off campus after lights-out, who downed a quart of vodka a day and nodded off in class, who faked medical excuses to get out of gym, who went weeks without showering (“Give us a break”), who jerked off in the back of class to the amazement of their neighbors (“Yuck”), who farted and popped their zits in assembly (“Ee—yuh”), who bought term papers from brains or beat the brains up, who in one case seduced a master’s wife (“Neat”), in another a fat Latvian wash-up girl with greasy braids on the kitchen staff (“Barf”). My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia—though Chuck didn’t give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he’d find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she’s lowered onto your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face.

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

  The beer in my hand had gone flat, it tasted rancid in my mouth. My stomach tightened and I could feel the night’s pizza pushing its way up my throat. “You wanna go next, Skinny?” Kate asked, blowing me a kiss. I moved upstairs as fast as I could to the bathroom and heard Josh’s howling laugh behind me. “Not him! Everyone knows Skinny’s as queer as a unicorn.” I didn’t throw up, but when I came out of the bathroom, Josh was waiting for me. “You all right?” I nodded and apologized, said I was sorry for being a lightweight. We sat down at the top of the stairs and he took my hand. “Dude, you know I love you, right?” I just looked at him. I hadn’t noticed before how blue his eyes were, hadn’t known before that eyes could have freckles. He took off my glasses and brushed his fingers along my eyebrows, then through my weak attempt at a goatee. “Jesus, you’ve got a lot of hair.” He put my glasses back on and smiled. “I mean it, man. I love you, more than any of those other guys. More than her even and I fuck her. It doesn’t matter that you’re a fag. I mean, what do I care, right?” He took my hand again and I watched him rub the flap of skin between my thumb and index finger. I wanted to love him back but then a cut on his thumb scraped against my hand, just a slight tug, and I could feel those calloused hands pulling the blanket away, I could smell beery breath again. Josh didn’t notice any change in me or, if he did, he ignored it and kept talking. “I just want you to know, anyone gives you any shit, and I mean anyone, you let me know. Cuz I love you, bro.” Downstairs, they were laughing and Kate hollered for us to hurry up. “You know, you could sleep with her, if you wanted,” Josh went on. “She’d let you. I don’t know but maybe that’d help or something.” I shook my head and stood to leave but he kept talking. “Well, you wouldn’t have to be alone. I could be there. It could be, like, the three of us. And if you’re not into her, you know, you could be into me or something.” I thought about Kate downstairs, tried to imagine her overhearing this conversation. I tried to think of her eyes but couldn’t picture their color. I didn’t even know if her hair color was natural but Josh was offering her to me like she was some toy we could share. Or maybe I was the toy. I thanked him, I even apologized to him, though I felt sick about the offer, about what Josh must think about Kate, what he must think about me.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  She held her own—more than that, she got in a good shot against Buchanan in his camel suit jacket and brown-striped tie, giving a face and a voice to the yearslong right-wing onslaught. But inside her, it was a different story. Inside, she was dissolving, her eyes revealing just a glint from that hidden puddle. Judy was suffering. She felt “isolated and alone.” The years of being scrutinized, of being called a bad influence and a pornographer, had chipped away at her. And it wasn’t just sexual themes that her critics had issues with. “I had letters from angry parents accusing me of ruining Christmas forever because of a chapter in Superfudge , called ‘Santa Who?,’ ” she wrote in her essay for American Libraries , referring to a sequence where Peter and Fudge acknowledge that Santa isn’t real. (This is still a thing! Librarian Lauren Harrison said when elementary schoolers check Superfudge out of the library, she taps out a quick email to the parents warning them that “there’s a whole chapter that blows up Santa Claus.”) Other moms and dads tossed off angry notes to Judy about her language. “Some sent lists showing me how easily I could have substituted one word for another. Meanie for bitch , darn for damn , nasty for ass … Perhaps most shocking of all was a letter from a nine-year-old addressed to Jew dy Blume telling me I had no right to write about Jewish angels in Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself .” Blume couldn’t help but take the criticisms personally, even though she knew other authors—from Norma Klein to canonical writers, including John Steinbeck and Anne Frank—were being targeted, too. Unlike Blume, Klein mostly found the whole thing amusing. In the summer of 1982, Publishers Weekly came out with a list of the most banned writers in America, which included Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence. “Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for children,” Klein wrote in an essay for the American Library Association called “On Being a Banned Writer.” “My first thought was: I’ll never be in such good company again,” she joked, before calling it “Perhaps the proudest moment of my literary career.” As her daughter Jennifer Fleissner confirmed, Klein was “happy to be a quiet pioneer.” It helped that she, like Judy, received letter after gushing letter in the mail, “mostly from girls who were just so thankful for the books and felt… it was this window into another world and another way of thinking that was very important to them,” Fleissner said. Also like Judy, Klein hadn’t set out to be a renegade. But Norma wasn’t afraid to step into that role. “Once she realized that people did see the books as blazing this trail, then I think that was a mantle that she was willing to take on,” Fleissner said.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Why?” Miri wasn’t sure how to answer. “No reason.” “Are you going with him?” Was she going with him? Did being in love for a week count? Christina didn’t wait for her to answer. “He’s a nice boy,” she said. “A hard worker. He wants to get out of Janet Memorial and as soon as Jack can move into a better place…” But Miri didn’t hear the rest of what Christina was saying. She was stuck at Janet Memorial. “It’s temporary,” Christina continued. “Like I was saying, as soon as Jack moves into a better place he’ll be able to take Mason to live with him. In the meantime, you want to do something nice for Mason—take his dog, Fred.” She had no idea he lived at Janet Memorial, the orphanage on Salem Avenue. He hadn’t told her anything about his life and she hadn’t asked him any questions. But so what? She knew how she felt when they were together. Wasn’t that enough? Fred was a different story. Mason took Fred everywhere, except to work and to school. One day over vacation he asked if she could keep him for the afternoon, while he was at work. She’d told him sure, without thinking about what she’d do with him. She couldn’t risk bringing him home. If Irene caught her with a dog in the house she’d be in big trouble. So she’d gone to Suzanne’s, whose parents were both at work. She’d had to hold Fred in her arms to keep him from setting foot on the floor or, worse, jumping onto the furniture. In Suzanne’s room they’d made a little bed for him out of a box and some rags. Barking was off-limits. Suzanne lived in an apartment house on Chilton where dogs weren’t allowed. After her visit to Dr. O’s office she told Mason she’d had her teeth cleaned and that Dr. O had found a small cavity. “I have to go back to get it filled. He said I won’t need Novocain.” Mason wasn’t impressed. “I’ve had teeth pulled without Novocain and it hurt like hell.” “Dr. O would never hurt you.” “That’s where I’m going from now on.” They were walking home from the movies. “So I was wondering,” she said, not able to stop herself, “where does Fred live?” A shadow fell over his face. Why was she doing this? “He lives around,” Mason said. “He stays with one of my friends. But I pay for his food and I walk him every day. I can’t have a dog at Janet, if that’s what you’re getting at.” She hated herself for putting him in this position. “I’m sorry.” “For what?” “That you’re an orphan.” He forced a laugh and grabbed her hand, pulling her behind him as he ran. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00011.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00011.jpg] C-46 HAS A CHECKERED HISTORYGIs Nicknamed the Transport “The Flying Coffin”By Henry AmmermanDEC.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “Spirit,” said I, “that dost subdue thee to mount up; if thou art that one who answered me, make thyself known to me by place or by name.” “I was a Sienese,” it answered, “and with these others here do cleanse my sinful life, weeping unto Him that he lend himself to us. 8 Sapient was I not albeit Sapia I was named, and of others hurt I was far more glad than of mine own good fortune. And that thou mayst not think I deceive thee, hear if I was mad as I tell thee. Already when the arc of my years was descending, 9 my townsmen, hard by Colle, were joined in battle with their foes, and I prayed God for that which he had willed. There were they routed, and rolled back in the bitter steps of flight, and seeing the case I took joy exceeding all other; so much, that I lifted up my impudent face, crying to God: ‘Now I fear thee no more,’ as the blackbird doth for a little fair weather. 10 I would have peace with God on the brink of my life; and my debts were not yet reduced by penitence, had it not been that Peter the Combseller 11 remembered me in his holy prayers, who in his charity did grieve for me. But who art thou that goest asking of our state, and bearest thine eyes unsewn, as I believe, and breathing dost speak?” “Mine eyes,” said I, “from me here shall yet be taken; but for short time, for small is the offence they did through being turned in envy. Greater far is the fear wherewith my soul is suspended, of the torment below, for even now the burden down there weighs upon me.” 12 And she to me: “Who then hath led thee up here among us, if thou thinkest to return below?” And I: “He who is with me and saith no word; and I am living, and therefore do thou ask of me, spirit elect, if thou wouldst that yonder I lift yet for thee my mortal feet.” “Oh this is so new a thing to hear,” she answered, “that ’tis a great token that God loveth thee; therefore profit me sometimes with thy prayers. And I beseech thee by all thou most desirest, if e’er thou tread the land of Tuscany, that thou restore my fame among my kinsfolk. Thou wilt see them among that vain people who put their trust in Talamone, and will lose there more hopes than in finding the Diana; but the admirals shall lose most there.” 13 1. The expression “so far as here counts for a mile” (that is to say, “if you think of walking a mile, you will get the right impression”), is an indication which should be carefully noted, that we must not expect to be able to arrive at any consistent representation by exact matter-of-fact measurements in Hell and Purgatory.

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

  Good GirlsAmy Jo BurnsTHE TRUTH NO ONE TOLD YOU IS THAT, IN ORDER FOR A good girl to survive, she must make some things disappear. You know because you used to be one of the good girls; you used to know how to forget. But the truth you’re trying to tell yourself now is that you don’t need to be “good,” not anymore. You need to be seen, and in order to be seen, you need to let yourself remember. You were walking alone in the woods on the afternoon that you remembered the name of a man you’d sworn to forget. Twelve years had passed since you took that vow as a ten-year-old, and this name belonged to a man whose secrets you’d once known well, though he’d only ever known one of yours. He’d been the only piano teacher you’d had, and you just one of his many pupils. Back then, you’d been one of his good girls. Back then, he’d been teaching you how to make some truths disappear. In the fall of 1991, seven of your fellow students in western Pennsylvania defied their good girl graces when they came forward to admit your teacher had put his hands on them during their lessons, touching them softly to the beat of the metronome. You, though, feared the consequences of telling the truth more than the burden of staying silent. Your indoctrination into the sorority of good girls had begun long before your piano teacher ever put his hands on you. Good girls knew how to keep a smile at the ready (lest you be called conceited), how to turn their homework in on time (lest you be called lazy), and how to keep their mouth shut (lest you be called a troublemaker). Those of us who chose to stay silent didn’t need to be told to do so. There was an ungainly rhythm to the response to the accusations, the way his denials drowned out their honesty, and the way an entire town was outraged, but not on behalf of the victims. Parents, teachers, and even fellow students called this man a casualty of a conspiracy plotted by girls—good girls like you—whose backpacks were filled with permission slips and retainer lids, whose heads were full of spelling words and state capitals. Much of the furor spread not because a crime occurred, but because these girls had the nerve to say that it had. A good girl is a quick study, and this is what you, always a good girl, learned: It doesn’t matter how good you are, because a man will always be better.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “I used to tell myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t pretty like Deenie because I have a special brain and Deenie’s just ordinary,” Helen sobs. “But that didn’t help, Ma… because it’s not true!” Thelma doesn’t apologize. She gets defensive. But her defense is revealing of the ways her own regrets have guided her parenting. Her last line in the book serves to let her daughters know exactly why she’s been so meddlesome. “I wanted better for you,” she tells them as Helen and Deenie cry together. “Better than what I had for myself. That’s what I always planned for my girls… is that so wrong?” “I think of the story as one about parental expectations,” Blume writes in the afterword to the twenty-first-century paperback edition of Deenie . “What happens when a parent pigeonholes their children?” Judy took this question of pigeonholing seriously; Helen and Deenie are birds learning to flee the nest, figuring out who they’ll be when they land. Pigeons even figure into Deenie’s personal journey. The first day she wears the brace to school, the vice principal calls Deenie into her office to tell her that due to her diagnosis, she’s now eligible to ride “the special bus,” which is free. Instantly, Deenie rejects this idea—riding the bus with kids like Gena Courtney would reaffirm that she’s different—and she glances out the window, trying to hide her tears. On the ledge, she sees a pigeon and thinks, “Ma says pigeons are dirty birds with lots of germs and I should stay away from them.” The vice principal gives her a form and tells her to bring it home for her parents to sign. Deenie conveniently loses the form and two weeks later, the vice principal checks in about it. By then, Deenie’s bad attitude about wearing the brace has lifted. She’s not pleased about it, but she’s willing to withstand it as a temporary burden. “I looked out the window and no pigeons were on the ledge,” Deenie says, nodding to her ability to rise above her mother’s fears and biases. The pigeons are brief visitors in the manuscript, but Judy was quite proud of them, according to Dick Jackson. Their work together on the book focused on Deenie’s growth away from Thelma, as expressed through her relationship with her two best friends. An early draft of the novel established that Deenie was adopted, which served to distance her from Thelma as Deenie’s biological destiny started to unfurl. But Jackson wasn’t convinced this was the right way to do it. Instead, he and Judy talked it through and decided that Janet and Midge—Deenie’s closest schoolmates—could help to more robustly reflect Deenie’s maturation. Blume then built moments into the novel, including the trio shopping for a nightgown and going to the movies together, that illuminated all the stops on Deenie’s path. As always, Blume and Jackson were in lockstep when it came to their editorial vision for the project.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And then there were her other men—the one in California with all the money, who was Catholic and brought brandy alexanders to Mama’s bedside in the morning. Or the captain in the army with the sports car whom she’d met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Or the Jew in Chicago with the sailboat, the Camel cigarettes and the skin that tanned so easily. We’d analyze their motives hour after hour as the towns and countryside sped past. We’d sing songs. We’d listen to the news. We’d point out sights to one another. But soon we’d be talking again about Herb or Bill or Abe. Did he miss our mother? What were his intentions? Was he dating anyone else? Should Mom play harder to get? Mother gained weight, sighed beside the phone, cried, hypothesized, thought up schemes of seduction or revenge, and all her technique—that is, all her helplessness—made my sister more and more ashamed of her. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous. My mother’s helplessness filled my sister with confusion and shame. She was confused after Mother had talked her way with conviction and obsessive tenacity all the way around the circumference of an absence. Mother would say Abe was just stringing her along, he had dozens of women, she was just another gal—one burdened, moreover, with two brats. Within half an hour she’d convinced herself that he thought so much of her he was afraid of her. She was too cultured, too intelligent, too genteel, too dynamic for him. She frightened him. I wasn’t ashamed. I was coldly indifferent as my mind closed its locks and slowly flooded with dreams. I was a king or a god. How my mother longed for that phone to ring. When my sister was old enough to date, she, too, waited by the phone. The negligence of men toward women struck me as past belief; how could these men resist so much longing? All this waiting, of course, was a petri dish in which new cultures of speculation were breeding. Was he not calling to prove a point? His independence, perhaps? Men hated feeling trapped. His own desirability? Or had he found someone else? Or was he shy and himself waiting for a call? I half wanted to be a man, a grown-up man, but a gallant one who could finally put an end to all this suffering. My other half wanted to have a man; I thought I’d know better how to get one and keep him. Or else how to punish him for his neglect.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The dorm master tiptoed past my open door. He was on the lookout for boys breaking rules. Across the hall from me at his own desk a square-jawed German lad—who wrestled for the team, excelled at trig and played records of music he called “easy listening”—was working a slide rule and jotting down figures in his minuscule hand. His glasses blazed when he cocked his head at a certain angle, as though the numerical intelligence projected light rather than drank it in. On the wall above his head was an Eton pennant, placed with mathematical precision at the correct, casual angle, Gustav’s concession to frivolity. The master tiptoed back past my door. In fact, he was cutting up, taking giant, slow-motion steps, his hands raised high as a marionettists’s, his mouth turned down as though he himself were a truant who feared making a floorboard squeak—good for a chuckle. In my letter to my father I used the word homosexuality, thereby breaking a taboo and forcing two responses from him: silence and the money I wanted. Much later my stepmother told me I’d caused my father weeks of sleepless despair and that at first he had chosen to believe I wasn’t really a homosexual at all, merely a poseur hoping to appear “interesting.” Dad never asked me later if I’d been cured. He was no doubt afraid to know the answer. Certainly he and I never discussed my problem. Indeed, horror of the subject led to a blackout on all talk about my private life. My father didn’t like other men; he had no close male friends and he behaved toward the men in his own family according to the dictates of duty rather than the impulses of his heart. He so often ascribed cunning to other men, a covert plotting, that he approached them as enemies to whom he must extend an ambiguous hand, one that when not offering a cold greeting could contract into a fist. I was one of the men he didn’t like. Or should I say he simply didn’t like my nature—the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money? And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses, “they were as different as mist and mast.” All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

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

  I asked him to leave; I said I had to go to work. I did have to go to work; I did go to work, somehow. Numb with something more than a hangover, I texted my best friend and said that I had an “intense night with some dude.” She just said “Oh, girl,” unsurprised to get another text like that from me. I was a feminist activist and writer and thought leader. I knew better. That wasn’t rape. That was just some shitty sex. I would shake it off. I didn’t talk about it again for a year. A year later, I was thumbing through that anthology my first essay was in, Yes Means Yes, when I saw Latoya Peterson’s essay “The Not Rape, Rape.” But instead of being excited about being included in a special project, about having my first byline in a book, about being published alongside people I adored and admired, I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach: that night, the year before, I had been raped. I still didn’t want to talk about it. I got that book deal I’d been in talks for, to write Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life. It was an honest look at how women incorporate their feminist ideals into their romantic lives, specifically geared toward strong, feminist women who also happen to have that one terrible flaw—we date men and have to navigate the ins and outs of patriarchy while doing so. I wrote an entire book about love and dating and sex without mentioning having been raped—not to my editor or to most of my friends. I did travel the country, speaking to college students about the importance of women being brave, speaking for themselves, and telling their own stories. I became a campus evangelist for feminist blogging: the revelatory, connected, speaking-truth-to-power kind. Women would come up to me after my talks to tell me about the things with which they were grappling: sexism at school, the sexualization of their bodies, the pressure to be feminine, the pressure to have it all, and, of course, rape culture on campus. I helped women tell their stories about rape without talking about my own story of being raped. I also stopped having sex, for a long time. The first time I did it again, I sobbed uncontrollably, trying to hide it from the overly eager man who I’d let inside me. It happened the next time I had sex, too. I put on weight, digging myself deeper into overeating or drinking too much. I threw myself into my work, too; at least I had my work. I help women tell their stories, I thought. My story isn’t as serious, it isn’t as important. I am dealing with it. I am okay.

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

  The people of your hometown—small in size and big in illusion—prided themselves on being a virtuous community with righteous men at the helm. Your piano teacher was a member of the town’s most potent clique of leaders—men who taught science and math to elementary school children, coached a varsity sport, and played the church organ every Sunday. To attack or question one of those men was to criticize the town itself, and you didn’t dare blaspheme the only place you’d been taught would protect you from the rest of the world. You were just a girl, after all. Maybe you were, in fact, predisposed to fantasy, just as these men who fought in wars beside each other and hunted deer back-to-back assured themselves that you were. You knew that a girl, even a good one, was at best an unreliable source, and, at worst, a liar. After word spread about who had snitched, those girls who weren’t you sat alone at lunch tables, were cornered by other students after school, and had to sit in the classrooms of teachers who’d donated money to the piano teacher’s legal fund. One young woman’s family eventually left town because the environment had grown so hostile. Another was your best friend; she didn’t know that you had lied when you said he hadn’t touched you. You didn’t dare tell anyone—not her, not even yourself. You knew a good girl has to forget in order to survive. Another lie you were told is that the passage of time will blunt a wound. But by the time you turned eighteen, the weight of being one of the good girls made you buckle at the knees. Too many smiles, too many secrets, too many rules. As an adolescent you trusted no one. No matter how straight your As or unscathed your heart, the secret bled you from the inside out—even after you’d all but forgotten what the secret was. There is no path lonelier than the one a good girl forges for herself. Still, you felt claustrophobic in the town that bred crop after crop of good girls only to surrender their innocence as payment for its fantasies. You didn’t want to be named in anyone’s ransom note. So, instead, you ransomed yourself to higher education in Upstate New York, six hours from home. Then on a crisp, fall afternoon during your senior year in college, your piano teacher’s name flashed in your mind. The good girl in you could no longer contain it; your memory paid your virtue no mind. The leaves scattering the path that day were bright and fragile, not unlike the ones that folks back home used to rake into piles and burn on the weekends. Your piano teacher’s house—and the dark basement where he’d taught his lessons as he let his hands wander all over you—had been hidden among a crowd of trees. Leaves had always cloaked the path leading to his door on the first days of lessons every autumn.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  the desire of the flourishing crowns was not abated by distance of space, but it did even invade his dreams in the night time, and where the menaces of his master compelled him to tarry at home, the pestilent avarice of the gold egged him out of doors ; wherefore, putting all shame aside without further delay, he declared the whole matter to his mistress ; who, according to the light nature of women, when she heard him speak of so great a sum, put her chastity in pawn to the vile money. Myrmex, seeing the intent of his mistress, was very glad, and hastened to the ruin and breaking of his faith, and for great desire that the gold should not only be his, but that he might handle the same instantly, ran hastily to Philesitherus,declaringthat his mistress had consented to his mind, wherefore he demanded the gold which he promised ; and then incontinently Philesitherus delivered him ten golden crowns, who had never before possessed even money of copper. When night came, Myrmex brought him disguised and covered into his mistress’ chamber; but, about midnight, when he and she were together making the first sacrifice of love unto the goddess Venus, behold, her husband (contrary to their expectation) came and knocked at the door, calling with a loud voice and beating upon it with a stone, Their long tarrying increased the suspicion of the master, in such sort that he threatened to beat Myrmex cruelly: but he, being troubled with fear, and driven to his latter shifts, excused the matter as best he could, saying that he could not find the key, by reason it had been hidden curiously away and that the night was so dark. In the mean season Philesitherus, hearing the noise at the door, slipt on his coat (yet barefoot, because of his great confusion) and privily ran out 431 LUCIUS APULEIUS tione pedibus intectis procurrit cubiculo. "Tunc. Myrmex tandem clave pessulis subiecta repandit fores et recipit etiam tunc fidem deum boantem dominum, eoque propere cubiculum petente, clandes- tino transcursu dimittit Philesitherum. Quo iam pro limine liberato securus sui clausa domo rursum se reddidit quieti. * Sed dum prima luce Barbarus procedit cubiculo, videt sub lectulo soleas incognitas quibus inductus Philesitherus irrepserat, suspectisque e re nata quae gesta sunt, non uxori, non ulli familiarium cordolio patefacto, sublatis iis et in sinum furtim absconditis, iusso tantum Myrmece per conservos vincto forum versus attrahi, tacitos secum mugitus iterans rapidum dirigit gressum, certus solearum indicio vestigium adulteri posse se perfacile indipisci. Sed ecce per plateam dum Barbarus vultu turgido subductisque superciliis incedit iratus ac pone eum Myrmex vinculis obrutus, non quidem coram noxae prehensus, con- scientia tamen pessima. permixtus, lacrimis uberibus ac postremis lamentationibus inefficacem commovet miserationem, opportune Philesitherus oceurrens, quamquam diverso quodam negotio destinatus, re- pentina tamen facie permotus, non enim deterritus, recolens festinationis suae delictum et cetera conse- quenter suspicatus sagaciter, extemplo sumpta - familiari constantia, dimotis servulis invadit cum 432

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

  Because women like me get guidance up the wazoo re: what men want and how we can give it to them. Because the self-not-helping formula of media aimed at women sells sex as the end-all be-all, empowerment through disempowerment, and self-improvement via self-destruction. Because I wanted to have, or to be perceived as having, a bomb-ass pussy. Because growing up, beyond Rand and Cosmo, I was exposed almost exclusively to male narrators and protagonists and found myself inside the male mind, championing his desires, aligning with his frustrations. Because I’d think Give the man sex, my thoughts indistinguishable from his; He needs to have sex! I’d tell myself, merging obsessions, and assuming, as many do, that hot, hard-core, superlative sex was his God-given right. Because I was indoctrinated to the point that I demonized my own resistance for getting in between what he needed and how he wanted it. Because anyone who gets in between is, by default, wrong, withholding, and un-fun. Because what was important to him became the only important thing. Because most of what I knew about myself, about history, the future, Earth, came from his POV. Because I hadn’t yet read film theorist Laura Mulvey, who called out traditional storytelling in cinema, marked by a certain split: men are the subject while women are the spectacle, a sight to be seen and not heard—and so without a voice and without a story, and defined in terms of her relationships with men, and so without independence or agency, which—without even green-screen technology—dehumanizes her. Because real-life women internalize all this from the moment we first turn on a TV and learn how to read, then we make it our filter, our mythology and philosophy and religion, our every other thought and basis for interaction. Because we’re porous, susceptible to anything. Because we are surrounded with 24/7 access to text, images, and audio that inflate and distort what we think of as love, sex, and gender with the histrionic and pathological, the inexplicable and unattainable, the misogynistic and incomplete. Because first our thoughts reshape, next our emotions, then our behaviors, finally our identities and view of life itself. Because my boyfriend and I were born; we grew up; we’d been appropriated into the milieu; and because as special as my parents told me I was, no one deftly eludes media’s teeth. As Rebecca Solnit put it, “the elephant in the room is the room itself.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Please be quiet. I won’t hurt you.” We’re both bored. It’s six on a December night and the sky outside the filmy hotel curtains (they smell of coal smoke) has long been dark. The phone hasn’t rung all day—none of us is popular, that’s evident. Not my sister, not me, not Mom. “Ouch!” I whine. “That bandage is too tight!” “It’s not!” “It is so.” “It’s not.” “I’m telling you it is so.” “Well, just play with yourself,” my sister says. “I don’t want to play with you. You wanna know why? Do you? Wanna know why?” I’m sitting up in bed now, uneasy, wishing I hadn’t complained about the bandage. “I’ll tell you why: you smell bad. You do.” My sister sticks her face right into mine. One of her barrettes has come loose without her noticing, and suddenly an unexpectedly adult sweep of hair frames her face and caresses her shoulder. She’s so close that some of her hair grazes my cheek. “I do not,” I mumble uncertainly. Perhaps I do smell bad. But where is the bad smell coming from? My mouth? My bottom? My feet? I long to creep into the bathroom, to cup a hand over my mouth and nose and test my breath for foulness, then to examine my underwear for skid marks. Or is the bad smell inside me, the terrible decaying Camembert of my heart? “You do. You smell bad and I hate you. Wherever you go you smell bad, you stink up the place, how do you think I like having people think you’re my brother? And look at your big nostrils. And you’re such a big sissy, you can’t even throw a baseball, you throw like a girl, you can’t even walk right, you’re a gimp. You are. I’m not kidding.” Now it all seems too true. I’m an embarrassment—to my mother, my sister, most of all to myself. I haven’t a right to take up the space I occupy. I poison every room I enter. “Look at your nails,” my sister says, grabbing my hand and holding it under my nose for inspection. “You’ve got black gook under there. You’re icky. You really are. It’s probably poop. Do you play with your poop. You play with your poop, you play with your poop, you play with your poop.…” I can’t get her to shut up or to release my hand. Now she’s grabbed a pillow and stuffed it in my face. “Whatsa matter, can’t you take it, can’t you take it, play with your poop,” she’s chanting. I turn my head to breathe but she’s right there, applying the pillow to my face in this new position. Her terrible words continue, though the pillow muffles the sound. She’s planted a knee in my chest to hold me down. Terrified of suffocating, I push her off in a frantic burst of energy. I grab the nail scissors and stab her in the hand. Blood leaps out.

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

  A couple months before the rape, a truck had hit me. It wasn’t a big truck—one of those little ones, a Toyota or a Nissan with a canopy on the back. I was riding across the crosswalk on my bike. I knew I was supposed to walk my bike across, but I had the green light and the white walking man, so I had started to zip across when the man driving the truck, not seeing me, made the decision to turn right on red. I went down hard, but I was wearing a helmet, and though the truck didn’t stop right away, it did soon enough. My legs and half my twisted bike were under the bumper. When I wriggled free, I felt nothing in particular until I saw the horrified, worried face of the man emerging from the cab, the two women running from the building across the street. “Oh my God, are you okay? Are you okay?” A car stopped behind the truck and more people whose sexes and sizes have been lost to memory got out. Lying on the cold, wet road, I was surrounded by concerned bystanders. I did feel something: mortification and shame. My arm and leg on the pavement side were both bleeding, but I hadn’t been dressed for the weather, or for biking. I was coming back from a class at the gym, so I was wearing a sweatshirt and black Lycra pants. Ruined now, I thought. Shit. “Are you okay?” Everybody seemed to be saying the same thing, over and over, and I was worried they were all going to get really wet. It was March in Eugene, with drizzle so thick and gray and constant, I couldn’t tell whether the raindrops were moving up or down. I must have been in shock. “Are you okay?” “Yeah,” I mumbled, grabbing for the bumper and pulling myself off the ground. Hands all around, but I reached out for none of them. “I’m fine. I’m okay.” Somehow we all got to the sidewalk on the other side. My bike had a twisted rim and was unrideable. “Are you sure you’re okay? Can we help you get somewhere?” “Oh, no, I’m fine. My dorm’s right over there. I’m fine.” And so everybody left, even the little truck that had flattened me, and I thought over and over: I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. In fact, I had been run over by a truck, but I couldn’t say that out loud. I couldn’t say how much it hurt. Embarrassed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong pants, I limped back to my dorm in the rain. Do you understand yet why we blame ourselves when we are hit, dragging the shame behind us like a twisted rim?