Surprise

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I confess, I was intrigued. Any gent who could bring such a sense of drama to the staging of an encounter which, in the ordinary course of things, might be settled so unspectacularly - by a word, or a nod, or the fluttering of one spit-blacked lash - was clearly someone special. I was also, frankly, flattered; and having been flattered, generous. Since he had had to make do so far with admiring my bottom from a distance, I felt it only fair to give him the chance of a closer look — though he must, of course, be content only to look.I advanced a little towards the open door. Within, all was dark; I saw only the vague outline of a shoulder, an arm, a knee, against the lighter square of the far window. Then briefly the end of a cigarette glowed bright in the blackness, and glimmered redly on a pale gloved hand, and a face. The hand was slender, and had rings upon it. The face was powdered: a woman’s face. I was too surprised even to laugh - too startled, for a moment, to do anything but stand at the rim of gloom that seemed to spill out from the carriage, and gape at her; and in that moment, she spoke.‘Can I offer you a ride?’Her voice was rich and rather haughty, and somehow arresting. It made me stammer. I said: ‘That, that’s very kind of you, madam’ - I sounded like a mincing shop-boy refusing a tip - ‘but I’m not five minutes from home, and I shall get there all the quicker if you’ll let me say good-night, and pass on my way.’ I tilted my cap towards the dark place where the voice had come from, and, with a tight little smile, I made to move on.But the lady spoke again.‘It’s rather late,’ she said, ‘to be out on one’s own, in streets like these.’ She drew on her cigarette, and the tip glowed bright again in the shadows. ‘Won’t you let me drop you somewhere ? I have a very capable driver.’I thought, I am sure you do: her man was still hunched forward in his seat, his back to me, his thoughts his own. I felt suddenly weary. I had heard stories in Soho about ladies like this — ladies who rode the darkened streets with well-paid servants, on the lookout for idle men or boys like me who’d give them a thrill for the price of a supper.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She began to read aloud. Her tone was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with passion - I had never heard such passion in her voice, before.‘0 mater! 0 fils!’ she read. ‘0 brood continental! 0 flowers of the prairies! 0 space boundless! 0 hum of mighty products! 0 you teeming cities! 0 so invincible, turbulent, proud! 0 race of the future! 0 women! O fathers! O you men of passion and storm! 0 beauty! 0 yourself! 0 you bearded roughs! 0 bards! 0 all those slumberers! 0 arouse! the dawn-bird’s throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?’She sat still for a moment, gazing down at the page; then she raised her eyes to mine, and I saw with surprise that they were gleaming with unspilled tears. She said, ‘Don’t you think that marvellous, Nancy? Don’t you think that a marvellous, marvellous poem?’‘Frankly, no,’ I said: the tears had unnerved me. ‘Frankly, I’ve seen better verses on some lavatory walls’ — I really had. ‘If it’s a poem, why doesn’t it rhyme? What it needs is a few good rhymes and a nice, jaunty melody.’ I reached to take the book from her, and studied the passage she had read - it had been underlined, at some earlier date, in pencil — then sang it out, to the approximate tune and rhythm of some music-hall song of the moment. Florence laughed, and, with one hand upon Cyril, tried to snatch the book from me.‘You’re a beast!’ she cried. ‘You’re a shocking philistine.’‘I’m a purist,’ I said primly. ‘I know a nice bit of verse when I see it, and this ain’t it.’ I flipped through the book, abandoning my attempt to try to force the staggering lines into some sort of melody, but reading all the ludicrous passages that I could find - there were many of them - and all in the silly American drawl of a stage Yankee. At last I found another underlined section, and started on that. ‘O my comrade!’ I began. ‘O you and me at last — and us two only; 0 power, liberty, eternity at last! 0 to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness! 0 the pensive aching to be together - you know not why, and I know not why...’My voice trailed away; I had lost my Yankee drawl, and spoken the last few words in a self-conscious murmur.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother said hens ate their own eggs if they were left alone with them too long. I used to wake when the sky was still a shut eyelid, she said. If she out-slept the sun, there were no eggs left to collect. My mother opened her mouth, guided my fingers so deep down her throat I felt the hilt of a feather and plucked it out. She coughed as I cleaned off its scabbard of spit. I asked her what it did. All voices have wings, she said, that’s how they travel. I told her this was a regular chicken feather, flightless, but she said it’s easy to assimilate into the air. You just have to believe your bones hollow, no marrow no mother no memory. _ My mother always wore white socks with throats of lace, and when I asked her why, she said, My feet are hibernating. When I asked my brother, he said she probably had fish fins instead of feet, and to find out we snipped a hole through her socks while she was sleeping. We slit her socks along the sole, parting them to show the stone pads of her feet. On her left foot, the three littlest toes were gone. No wound, no scars or sign of stitching, just stumps with rings like a tree. Sleeves of space where three toes might have grown up, been given names. My brother and I ran back to bed and hid the scissors under our mattress. In the morning, our mother was wearing a new pair of socks. Where did they go? we asked, and our mother refused to answer. I asked if she’d been preyed on by Hu Gu Po and she said not everything was a story. Weeks later, we found an assortment cookie tin behind the other cookie tin that held my birth certificate and her sewing kit, both of them in the pantry where our mother kept inedible things: blankets, batteries, retired knives, a titanium baseball bat. There was a cartoon bear indented into the lid of the tin, and the blue paint had been battered off. Inside it were hardened rings of ash and in the center, brown stones. At first we thought they were chrysalises of some kind, bark-covered tubes rattling as if something inside were trying to hatch. But there were nails still growing from them, caramelizing in the tin’s body heat. We had found her toes. They hummed as if they owned our hearts, and we thought there was still a chance they could be sewn back on. When we showed her, she said, I don’t want them back. My brother and I held a ceremony to bury the toes, even writing a eulogy: Here lie the toes of our mother. May the soil eat them and shit them out as beautiful trees that smell like our feet.

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

  The martyrs and confessors of the first three centuries, in their expectation of the impending end of the world and their desire for the speedy return of the Lord, had never once thought of such a thing as the great and sudden change, which meets us at the beginning of this period in the relation of the Roman state to the Christian church. Tertullian had even held the Christian profession to be irreconcilable with the office of a Roman emperor.129 Nevertheless, clergy and people very soon and very easily accommodated themselves to the new order of things, and recognized in it a reproduction of the theocratic constitution of the people of God under the ancient covenant. Save that the dissenting sects, who derived no benefit from this union, but were rather subject to persecution from the state and from the established Catholicism, the Donatists for an especial instance, protested against the intermeddling of the temporal power with religious concerns.130 The heathen, who now came over in a mass, had all along been accustomed to a union of politics with religion, of the imperial with the sacerdotal dignity. They could not imagine a state without some cultus, whatever might be its name. And as heathenism had outlived itself in the empire, and Judaism with its national exclusiveness and its stationary character was totally disqualified, Christianity must take the throne.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The curious thing about such a ladder, however, is that its very ingenuity undermines its function. You would think that it would allow a single person to scurry up to its full height and pluck out a book from even a very high shelf. And so it does, they do. But with a catch. Someone must brace the ladder, because the freedom made possible by the wheels is offset by the fact that the wheels can turn in their brackets — the ladder’s height making it too heavy for the wheels to only move in one direction, the designer of such things having apparently decided it was easier to find a person to “mind” the ladder rather than to help move the ladder. I think you were inclined to climb up it just for the fun of it — or to see my reaction. But as it turns out (and don’t things have an interesting way of turning out, when you start off properly?), the book we were looking for was supposedly on the top shelf where the ladder was. So, you being young and spry (and wearing a very short skirt), were selected as our ambassador to the heights. And while you were rummaging around trying to find the book in question, batting away the dust and dead moths, you came upon another volume called The Chains of Desire. It was on the very top shelf, near where the other book should’ve been. It looked old and the spine was broken, but the original making was clearly of a very high standard. You couldn’t resist having a look, having climbed up to the top of the ladder and blown away a cloud of dust to boot. And you couldn’t help thinking that whatever page you opened up to would mean something. A special stop on the journey. A clue in the treasure hunt. Balanced on the top step of the ladder, you opened to a scene. And, to your surprise, this is what you saw ... you see it now ... and will never quite forget it. The picture is sumptuously illustrated and deeply obscene. It shows a man, naked and tautly muscled, wearing a glistening metal Rain and the Library 291 mask in the shape of a bull’s head — like the suggestion of a minotaur. There is something evil and yet inviting about the beast face ... something forbidden and perverse ... and yet proud, noble, even tragic. You can’t quite bring the impression into focus, for there are other things to consider. Like the height of the ladder.

• From Cultish (2021)

  These folks can be thought of as “nerds” because what they’re really doing is experimenting in corners of sexual culture that might not be considered conventionally cool or glamorous. Analogously, I like to think of certain cultish religious types as “spiritual nerds.” They’re the people who geek out on niche theological theories that others might not come across, who find themselves on a lifelong journey of reckoning with their life purpose and are willing to look outside the box to find it. “I’ve always been curious about the outskirts of society,” Abbie Shaw, the ex-Shambhalan, told me. “I grew up in a privileged family, a traditional synagogue, a big city. Now I’m a Buddhist and work on Skid Row.” There is nothing inherently wrong with spiritual nerdiness. Exploring different belief systems, taking nothing you’ve learned in Sunday school for granted, and coming to your own decisions is what so many twenty-first-century young people are already doing, to varying degrees. As Abbie said, “I’d been searching for a long time before Shambhala. I showed up and thought, ‘Let’s just see where this goes.’” But Abbie still struggles with how much unquestioned faith she had to put into her teachers. Sometimes she flashes back to a chant she had to recite daily called “the supplication for the Sakyong .” The chant reinforced members’ unending devotion to their leader, Trungpa’s successor, asking the Buddha to prolong his life. Abbie always had uneasy feelings about the Sakyong, and she bristled against this obligation to ritualistically exalt him. At the same time, she loved her community enough to assume the best and roll with it. Looking back, she’s disturbed by how long her trust was drawn out: “It was never supposed to be two years of my life,” she confessed. Sticking with the kink metaphor, there’s only one way to have a constructive, nontraumatizing experience using whips and bondage, and it’s by having a key component down pat: consent. You have to have a safe word so that your partner knows exactly when you want out. Kink fundamentally doesn’t work without this. Metaphorically, you need a safe word with religion, too. When you’re experimenting with faith and belief, there has to be room to ask questions, express your misgivings, and seek outside information, both early on and deep into your membership. “The most important thing to remember is that if something is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny,” Steven Hassan told me. In 2018, Abbie had already decided to leave Shambhala when a bombshell news story surfaced. That summer, the New York Times published a series of grievous report s accusing the Sakyong of sexual assault. A group of ex-Shambhala women united to bring forward their testimonies about not just the Sakyong, but also some high-ranking teachers. Abbie released a pensive exhale: “It was surreal to watch this whole community crumble.” Soon after the controversy, Abbie quietly slipped out of Vermont.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Even from the time that he was a boy, your grandfather Onyango was strange. It is said of him that he had ants up his anus, because he could not sit still. He would wander off on his own for many days, and when he returned he would not say where he had been. He was very serious always—he never laughed or played games with the other children, and never made jokes. He was always curious about other people’s business, which is how he learned to be a herbalist. You should know that a herbalist is different from a shaman—what the white man calls a witch doctor. A shaman casts spells and speaks to the spirit world. The herbalist knows various plants that will cure certain illnesses or wounds, how to pack a special mud so that a cut will heal. As a boy, your grandfather sat in the hut of the herbalist in his village, watching and listening carefully while the other boys played, and in this way he gained knowledge. When your grandfather was still a boy, we began to hear that the white man had come to Kisumu town. It was said that these white men had skin as soft as a child’s, but that they rode on a ship that roared like thunder and had sticks that burst with fire. Before this time, no one in our village had seen white men—only Arab traders who sometimes came to sell us sugar and cloth. But even that was rare, for our people did not use much sugar, and we did not wear cloth, only a goatskin that covered our genitals. When the elders heard these stories, they discussed it among themselves and advised the men to stay away from Kisumu until this white man was better understood. Despite this warning, Onyango became curious and decided that he must see these white men for himself. One day he disappeared, and no one knew where he had gone. Then, many months later, while Obama’s other sons were working the land, Onyango returned to the village. He was wearing the trousers of a white man, and a shirt like a white man, and shoes that covered his feet. The small children were frightened, and his brothers didn’t know what to make of this change. They called Obama, who came out of his hut, and the family gathered ’round to stare at Onyango’s strange appearance.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her accent was rather purer, with slightly less colour to it, than I remembered. ‘Forgotten you?’ I said then, finding my own voice at last. ‘No. I’m only so very surprised, to see you.’ I gazed at her, and swallowed. Her eyes were as brown as ever, her lashes as dark, her lip as pink ... But she had changed, I had seen it at once. There were one or two creases beside her mouth and at her brow, that told of the years that had passed since we were sweethearts; and she had let her hair grow, so that it curved above her ears in a great, glossy pompadour. With the creases and the hair she did not look, any more, like the prettiest of boys: she looked, as the girl she had sent to me had said, like a lady. As I studied her, so she gazed at me. At last she said, ‘You seem very different, to when I saw you last ...’ I shrugged. ‘Of course. I was nineteen then. I’m twenty-five, now.’ ‘Twenty-five in two weeks’ time,’ she answered; and her lip trembled a little. ‘I remembered that, you see.’ I felt myself blush, and could not answer her. She gazed past me, into the tent. ‘You can imagine my surprise,’ she said then, ‘when I looked in there just now, and saw you lecturing from the stage. I never thought you’d end up on a platform in a tent, speaking on workers’ rights!’ ‘Neither did I,’ I said. Then I smiled, and so did she. ‘Why are you here, at all?’ I asked her then. ‘I’m in rooms at Bow. Everyone has been saying all week, that I must come to the park on Sunday, since there was to be such a marvellous thing in it.’ ‘Have they?’ ‘Oh, yes!’ ‘And - are you here quite alone, then?’ She glanced quickly away. ‘Yes. Walter’s in Liverpool just now. He has gone back to managing: he has shares in a hall up there, and has rented a house for us. I’m to join him when the house is ready.’ ‘And you’re still working the halls?’ ‘Not so much. We ... we had an act together -’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I saw you. At the Middlesex.’ Her eyes widened. ‘The time that you met Billy-Boy? Oh, Nan, if I had only known that you were watching! When Bill came back and said he’d seen you -’ ‘I couldn’t look at you for long,’ I said. ‘Were we so bad as that, then?’ She smiled, but I shook my head: ‘It wasn’t that ...’ Her smile grew fainter. I said, after a moment: ‘So you don’t work so much? How’s that?’ ‘Well, Walter is kept busy with the managing now.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She gazed past me, into the tent. ‘You can imagine my surprise,’ she said then, ‘when I looked in there just now, and saw you lecturing from the stage. I never thought you’d end up on a platform in a tent, speaking on workers’ rights!’‘Neither did I,’ I said. Then I smiled, and so did she. ‘Why are you here, at all?’ I asked her then.‘I’m in rooms at Bow. Everyone has been saying all week, that I must come to the park on Sunday, since there was to be such a marvellous thing in it.’‘Have they?’‘Oh, yes!’‘And - are you here quite alone, then?’She glanced quickly away. ‘Yes. Walter’s in Liverpool just now. He has gone back to managing: he has shares in a hall up there, and has rented a house for us. I’m to join him when the house is ready.’‘And you’re still working the halls?’‘Not so much. We ... we had an act together -’‘I know,’ I said. ‘I saw you. At the Middlesex.’Her eyes widened. ‘The time that you met Billy-Boy? Oh, Nan, if I had only known that you were watching! When Bill came back and said he’d seen you -’‘I couldn’t look at you for long,’ I said.‘Were we so bad as that, then?’ She smiled, but I shook my head: ‘It wasn’t that ...’ Her smile grew fainter.I said, after a moment: ‘So you don’t work so much? How’s that?’‘Well, Walter is kept busy with the managing now. And then - well, we kept it quiet, but I was rather ill.’ She hesitated. ‘I was to have a child ...’The thought was horrible to me, in every way. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.She shrugged. ‘Walter was disappointed. We have quite forgotten it now, however. It only means that I am not quite so strong as I once was ...’We fell silent. I looked for a second into the crowd, then back at Kitty. She had coloured. Now she said: ‘Nan, Bill told me, when he met you that time, that you were dressed - well, as a boy.’‘That’s right. I was. Quite as a boy.’ She laughed and frowned at once, not understanding.‘He said, too, that you were living with a - with a -’‘With a lady. I was.’She blushed still harder. ‘And - are you with her still?’‘No, I - I live with a girl now, in Bethnal Green.’‘Oh!’I hesitated - but then I did what I had done with Zena, two hours before. I moved slightly into the shadow of the tent, and Kitty followed. ‘That’s her over there,’ I said, nodding towards the seats before the platform. ‘The girl with the little boy.’Annie and Miss Raymond had moved away, and Florence sat alone now. As I gestured to her she looked over at me, then gazed gravely at Kitty.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  My earliest recollection is being danced on the foot of my father’s brother James, the Captain of an Indiaman, who paid us a visit in the south of Kerry when I was about two. I distinctly remember repeating a hymn by heart for him, my mother on the other side of the fireplace, prompting: then I got him to dance me a little more, which was all I wanted. I remember my mother telling him I could read, and his surprise. The next memory must have been about the same time: I was seated on the floor screaming when my father came in and asked: “What’s the matter?” “It’s only Master Jim”, replied the nurse crossly, “he’s just screaming out of sheer temper, Sir, look, there’s not a tear in his eye.” A year or so later, it must have been, I was proud of walking up and down a long room while my mother rested her hand on my head, and called me her walking stick. Later still I remember coming to her room at night: I whispered to her and then kissed her, but her cheek was cold and she didn’t answer, and I woke the house with my shrieking: she was dead. I felt no grief, but something gloomy and terrible in the sudden cessation of the usual household activities. A couple of days later I saw her coffin carried out, and when the nurse told my sister and me that we would never see our mother again, I was surprised merely and wondered why. My mother died when I was nearly four, and soon after we moved to Kingstown near Dublin. I used to get up in the night with my sister Annie, four years my senior and go foraging for bread and jam or sugar. One morning about daybreak I stole into the nurse’s room, and saw a man beside her in bed, a man with a red moustache. I drew my sister in and she too saw him. We crept out again without waking them. My only emotion was surprise, but next day the nurse denied me sugar on my bread and butter and I said: “I’ll tell”—I don’t know why: I had then no inkling of modern journalism. “Tell what?” she asked. “There was a man in your bed”, I replied, “last night.” “Hush, hush!” she said, and gave me the sugar. After that I found all I had to do was to say “I’ll tell!” to get whatever I wanted. My sister even wished to know one day what I had to tell, but I would not say. I distinctly remember my feeling of superiority over her because she had not had sense enough to exploit the sugar mine.

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

  “They are based on the experience of thousands of years,” she replied ironically, while her white fingers played over the dark fur. “The more devoted a woman shows herself, the sooner the man sobers down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will she increase his desire, be loved, worshipped by him. So it has always been, since the time of Helen and Delilah, down to Catherine the Second and Lola Montez.” “I cannot deny,” I said, “that nothing will attract a man more than the picture of a beautiful, passionate, cruel, and despotic woman who wantonly changes her favorites without scruple in accordance with her whim—” “And in addition wears furs,” exclaimed the divinity. “What do you mean by that?” “I know your predilection.” “Do you know,” I interrupted, “that, since we last saw each other, you have grown very coquettish.” “In what way, may I ask?” “In that there is no way of accentuating your white body to greater advantage than by these dark furs, and that—” The divinity laughed. “You are dreaming,” she cried, “wake up!” and she clasped my arm with her marble-white hand. “Do wake up,” she repeated raucously with the low register of her voice. I opened my eyes with difficulty. I saw the hand which shook me, and suddenly it was brown as bronze; the voice was the thick alcoholic voice of my cossack servant who stood before me at his full height of nearly six feet. “Do get up,” continued the good fellow, “it is really disgraceful.” “What is disgraceful?” “To fall asleep in your clothes and with a book besides.” He snuffed the candles which had burned down, and picked up the volume which had fallen from my hand, “with a book by”—he looked at the title page—“by Hegel. Besides it is high time you were starting for Mr. Severin’s who is expecting us for tea.” “A curious dream,” said Severin when I had finished. He supported his arms on his knees, resting his face in his delicate, finely veined hands, and fell to pondering.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The missing story really starts before I was born, when my mother and father met and, for reasons I still don’t get, quickly married. My mother had just arrived in Leechfield. She’d driven down from New York with an Italian sea captain named Paolo. He was fifty to her thirty, and her fourth husband. My mother didn’t date, she married. At least that’s what we said when I finally found out about all her marriages before Daddy. She racked up seven weddings in all, two to my father. My mother tended to blame the early marriages on her own mother’s strict Methodist values, which didn’t allow for premarital fooling around, of which she was fond. She and Paolo had barely finished the honeymoon and set up housekeeping in Leechfield, where he was fixing to ship out, than they began fighting. So it was on a wet winter evening in 1950 that she threw her dresses, books, and hatboxes in the back of an old Ford and laid rubber out of Leechfield, intending never to return. She was heading for her mother’s cotton farm about five hundred miles west. Just outside of Leechfield, where Highway 73 yields up its jagged refinery skyline to bayous and rice fields, she blew a tire. She was about twenty yards from the truck stop where Daddy happened to be working. He had a union job as an apprentice stillman at Gulf Oil, but he was filling in at the station that night for his friend Cooter, who’d called him in desperation from a crap game in Baton Rouge where he was allegedly on a roll. All Mother’s marriages, once I uncovered them in my twenties, got presented to me as accidents. Her meeting Daddy was maybe the most unlikely. Had Cooter not gotten lucky with the dice in a Baton Rouge honky-tonk, and had Paolo not perturbed Mother in the process of unpacking crates, and had the tire on the Ford not been worn from a recent cross-country jaunt (Paolo’s mother lived in Seattle, and they’d traveled there from New York, then down to Texas, where divorce laws permitted Mother to quickly get rid of husband number three before signing up with number four).… All these events conspired to strand my mother quite literally at my father’s feet on Highway 73 that night. He said there was a General Electric moon shining the first time he saw her, so bright it was like a spotlight on her. She refused his help jacking up the car and proceeded to cuss like a sailor when she couldn’t get the lug nuts loose. My mother claims that she had only recently learned to cuss, from Paolo. Daddy said her string of practiced invectives, which seemed unlikely given her fancy clothes (she had on a beige silk suit) and New York license plates, impressed him no end. He’d never heard a woman cuss like that before.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  41 Trans women of color in the US have an unemployment rate of four times the average, and about half of TWOC in the US have worked in the sex industry. See Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition, “Addressing Anti-Transgender Violence: Exploring Realities, Challenges and Solutions for Policymakers and Community Advocates,” November 2015, https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/HRC-AntiTransgenderViolence-0519.pdf?_ga=2.37418594.399382019.1536798503-1304962530.1536798503.42 Roxane Gay, Hunger (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 188–89.43 Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig (Universal City, CA: Universal Films, 2011).44 Based on British legal tradition, marital rape was explicitly exempted from sexual assault legislation in the US until the 1980s. Some laws remained on the books until the 1990s. Data drawn from Kathleen Basile, “Prevalence of Wife Rape and Other Intimate Partner Sexual Coercion in a Nationally Representative Sample of Women,” Violence Victims 17, no. 5 (2002): 511–24; Elaine K. Martin, Casey T. Taft, and Patricia A. Resick, “A Review of Marital Rape,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12, no. 3 (2007): 329–47; Patricia Mahoney and Linda M. Williams, “Sexual Assault in Marriage: Prevalence, Consequences and Treatment of Wife Rape,” in Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review of 20 Years of Research, ed. J. L. Jasinski and L. M. Williams (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 113–62; and Kathleen Basile, “Rape by Acquiescence: The Ways in Which Women ‘Give in’ to Unwanted Sex with Their Husbands,” Violence against Women 5, no. 9 (1999): 1036–58.45 That is, all labor is “embodied” labor. Or as Marx put it, labor power is the collection of “mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1990), 270.46 Anne Elizabeth Moore, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex and Trafficking (Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2015).47 Ritu Mahajan, “The Naked Truth: Appearance Discrimination, Employment, and the Law,” Asian American Law Journal 14 (2007): 165–203.48 Sexual harassment of women retail workers ranges from 25 percent to nearly 70 percent. See Laura Good and Rae Cooper, “‘But It’s Your Job to Be Friendly’: Employees Coping with and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector,” Gender, Work and Organization 23 no. 5 (2016): 447–69.49 Pulma Sumac, “A Disgrace Reserved for Prostitutes: Complicity and the Beloved Community,” Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (2015): 13.50 Jacqueline Frances, Striptastic! A Celebration of Dope-ass Cunts Who Love Money (self-published, 2017).A Timeline/Tutorial on SquirtingThis is another piece that my feminist heart says should be a common conversation. I am tired of old narratives that don’t acknowledge that the majority of the human species, regardless of gender, ejaculate. The first time was an accident, being fucked from behind I suddenly felt I would come apart and then something was loose in me, something was on my thighs, something covered the bed beneath me, tears with the intensity of grief or joy on my cheeks. I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but he did, and he seemed confused and pleased. No one had told us this could happen.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The tent, now, was quiet: there was no speaker on the platform, and people had taken advantage of the break to drift outside into the sunlight and the bustle of the field. Miss Raymond said brightly, ‘Let us all sit down, shall we?’ As we moved to occupy a row of empty seats, however, a little girl came trotting up, and caught my eye. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ she said. ‘Are you the gal what give the lecture?’ I nodded. ‘There is a lady just outside the tent, then, says will you please step up and have a word?’ Annie laughed, and raised her eyebrows. ‘Another lecture tour offer, perhaps?’ she said. I looked at the girl, and hesitated. ‘A lady, you say?’ ‘Yes miss,’ she said firmly. ‘A lady. Dressed real smart, with her eyes all hid behind a hat with a veil on it.’ I gave a start, and looked quickly at Florence. A lady in a veil: there was only one person that could be. Diana must have seen me after all, and watched me give my speech, and now sought me out for- who knew what queer purpose? The idea made me tremble. When the girl stepped away I turned to gaze after her, and Florence shifted in her seat, and stared with me. In the corner of the tent there was a square of sunlight, where the canvas had been tied back to form a doorway - it was so bright I had to narrow my eyes to look at it, and blink. At one edge of the square of light stood a woman, her face concealed, as the girl had said, by a broad hat and a width of net. As I studied her, she lifted her arms to her veil, and raised it. And then I saw her face. ‘Why don’t you go to her?’ I heard Florence say coldly. ‘I daresay she has come to ask you back to St John’s Wood. You shall never have to think of socialism again, there ...’ I turned to her; and when she saw how pale my cheeks were, her expression changed. ‘It’s not Diana,’ I whispered. ‘Oh, Flo! It’s not Diana -’ It was Kitty. I stood for a moment quite dumbfounded. I had seen two old lovers already today; and here was the third of them - or, rather, the first of them: my original love; my one true love - my real love, my best love - the love who had so broken my heart, it seemed never to have fired quite properly again ... I went to her, without another glance at Florence, and stood before her and rubbed my eyes against the sun — so that, when I looked at her again, she seemed surrounded by a thousand dancing points of light. ‘Nan,’ she said, and she smiled, rather nervously. ‘You have not forgotten me, I hope?’ Her voice shook a little, as it had used to do, sometimes, in passion.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  An examination came and I was first in the school in arithmetic and first too in elocution; Vernon even praised me, while Willie slapped me and got kicked on the shins for his pains. Vernon separated us and told Willie he should be ashamed of hitting one only half as big as he was. Willie lied promptly, saying I had kicked him first. I disliked Willie; I hardly know why, save that he was a rival in the school life. After this Annie began to treat me differently and now I seemed to see her as she was and was struck by her funny ways. She wished both Chrissie and myself to call her “Nita”; it was short for “Anita”, she said, which was the stylish French way of pronouncing Annie. She hated “Annie”—it was “common and vulgar”; I couldn’t make out why. One evening we were together and she had undressed Chrissie for bed, when she opened her own dress and showed us how her breasts had grown while Chrissie’s still remained small, and indeed “Nita’s” were ever so much larger and prettier and round like apples. Nita let us touch them gently and was evidently very proud of them. She sent Chrissie to bed in the next room while I went on learning a lesson beside her. Nita left the room to get something, I think, when Chrissie called me and I went into the bedroom wondering what she wanted. She wished me to know that her breasts would grow too, and be just as pretty as Nita’s. “Don’t you think so!” she asked, and taking my hand put it on them, and I said, “Yes”, for indeed I liked her better than Nita who was all airs and graces and full of affectations. Suddenly Nita called me, and Chrissie kissed me, whispering “don’t tell her” and I promised. I always liked Chrissie and Vernon. Chrissie was very clever and pretty, with dark curls and big hazel eyes, and Vernon was a sort of hero and always very kind to me. I learned nothing from this happening. I had hardly any sex-thrill with either sister, indeed, nothing like so much as I had had, five years before, through the girl’s legs in Mrs. Frost’s school, and I record the incident here chiefly for another reason. One afternoon about 1890, Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel, a very pretty girl, had been lunching with me in Park Lane. Afterwards we went into the Park. I accompanied them as far as Hyde Park Corner. For some reason or other, I elaborated the theme that men of thirty or forty usually corrupted young girls, and women of thirty or forty in turn corrupted youths. “I don’t agree with you”, Aubrey remarked: “It’s usually a fellow’s sister who gives him his first lessons in sex. I know it was Mabel here, who first taught me.” I was amazed at his outspokenness; Mabel flushed crimson and I hastened to add:

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Behind me, the queue had grown longer; now there came a cry: ‘What’s the delay there?’ Bill took the coats from me at last, walked quickly to a hook with them, and gave me a ticket. Then he stepped a little to one side, leaving his friend to struggle with the cloaks, for a minute, on his own. I moved too, away from the jostling gents, and we stood facing each other across the desk, shaking our heads. His brow was shiny with sweat. His uniform was a white bum-shaver jacket and a cheap bow-tie, of scarlet. He said, ‘Lord, Nan, but you gave me a fright! I thought you must be some gentleman I owed money to.’ He looked at my trousers, my jacket, my hair. ‘What are you up to, wandering about like that, here?’ He wiped his brow, then looked about him. ‘Are you here with an agent? You’re not in the show, Nan - are you?’ I shook my head; and then I said, very quietly, ‘You mustn’t say “Nan” now, Bill. The fact is -’ The fact was, I hadn’t thought what I would tell him. I hesitated; but it was impossible to lie to him: ‘Bill, I’m living as a boy just now.’ ‘As a boy?’ He said it loudly; then put a hand before his mouth. Even so, one or two of the grumbling gents in the queue turned their heads. I edged a little further away from them. I said again: ‘I’m living as a boy, with a lady who takes care of me ...’ And at that, at last, he looked a little more knowing, and nodded. Behind him, the Italian dropped a gentleman’s hat, and the gentleman tutted. Bill said, ‘Can you wait?’ and stepped to help his friend by taking another couple of cloaks. Then he moved towards me again. The Italian looked sour. I glanced over to Diana and Maria. The lobby had emptied a bit; they stood waiting for me. Maria had placed Satin on the floor and he was scratching at her skirt. Diana turned to catch my eye. I looked at Bill. ‘How are you, then?’ I asked him. He looked rueful, and lifted his hand: there was a wedding-ring on it. He said, ‘Well, I am married now, for a start!’ ‘Married! Oh, Bill, I am happy for you! Who’s the girl? It’s not Flora? Not Flora, our old dresser?’ He nodded, and said it was. ‘It is on account of Flora,’ he added, ‘that I am working here. She has a job on round the corner, a month at the Old Mo. She is still, you know’ - he looked suddenly rather awkward — ’s he is still, you know, dressing Kitty ...’ I stared at him. There came more mutters from the queue of gents, and more sour looks from the Italian, and he stepped back again to help with the cloaks and hats and tickets.

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

  To slip over minutes of no importance to the main of my story, I pass the interval to bed time, in which I was more and more pleased with the views that opened to me, of an easy service under these good people; and after supper being shewed up to bed, Miss Phœbe, who observed a kind of reluctance in me to strip and go to bed, in my shift, before her, now the maid was withdrawn, came up to me, and beginning with unpinning my handkerchief and gown, soon encouraged me to go on with undressing myself; and, blushing at now seeing myself naked to my shift, I hurried to get under the bed-clothes out of sight. Phœbe laughed and was not long before she placed herself by my side. She was about five and twenty, by her most suspicious account, in which, according to all appearances, she must have sunk at least ten good years; allowance, too, being made for the havoc which a long course of hackneyship and hot waters must have made of her constitution, and which had already brought on, upon the spur, that stale stage in which those of her profession are reduced to think of showing company, instead of seeing it. No sooner then was this precious substitute of my mistress laid down, but she, who was never out of her way when any occasion of lewdness presented itself, turned to me, embraced and kissed me with great eagerness. This was new, this was odd; but imputing it to nothing but pure kindness, which, for ought I knew, it might be the London way to express in that manner, I was determined not to be behind-hand with her, and returned her the kiss and embrace, with all the fervour that perfect innocence knew. Encouraged by this, her hands became extremely free, and wandered over my whole body, with touches, squeezes, pressures, that rather warmed and surprised me with their novelty, than they either shocked or alarmed me. The flattering praises she intermingled with these invasions, contributed also not a little to bribe my passiveness; and, knowing no ill, I feared none, especially from one who had prevented all doubts of her womanhood, by conducting my hands to a pair of breasts that hung loosely down, in a size and volume that full sufficiently distinguished her sex, to me at least, who had never made any other comparison. I lay then all tame and passive as she could wish, whilst her freedom raised no other emotion but those of a strange, and, till then, unfelt pleasure. Every part of me was open and exposed to the licentious courses of her hands, which, like a lambent fire, ran over my whole body, and thawed all coldness as they went.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  There is, however, at least one point on which everybody is in agreement: terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives—religious, economic, or social—are involved.20 Terrorism is always about “power—acquiring it or keeping it.”21 And so, according to one of the pioneering experts in the field, “all terrorist organizations, whether their long-term political aim is revolution, national self-determination, preservation or restoration of the status quo, or reform, are engaged in a struggle for political power with a government they wish to influence and replace.”22 The claim that the primary motivation of a terrorist action is political may seem obvious—but not to those who seem determined to regard such atrocious acts of violence as merely “senseless.” Many of that view, not surprisingly, find religion, which they regard as a byword for irrationality, to be the ultimate cause. One of the most prominent is Richard Dawkins, who has argued that “only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.”23 This dangerous oversimplification springs from a misunderstanding of both religion and terrorism. It is, of course, a familiar enough expression of the secularist bias of modernity, which has cast “religion” as a violent, unreasonable force that must be excluded from the politics of civilized nations.24 Somehow it fails to consider that all the world’s great religious traditions share as one of their most essential tenets the imperative of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself. This, of course, is not to deny that religion has often been implicated in terrorist atrocities, but it is far too easy to make it a scapegoat rather than trying to see what is really going on in the world. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The first act of Islamic terrorism to grab the world’s attention was the murder of President Anwar Sadat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, hero of the Camp David Accords, and widely regarded in the West as a progressive Muslim leader. Western peoples were aghast at the ferocity of the attack. On October 6, 1981, during a parade celebrating Egypt’s victories in the October War of 1973, First Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli jumped out of his truck, ran toward the presidential stand, and opened fire with a machine gun, shooting round after round into Sadat and killing seven people besides the president and injuring twenty-eight others. His political motivation was clearly regime change, but revolutionary fervor was fused with Islamic sentiment. At his trial Islambouli gave three reasons for murdering Sadat: the suffering of Egyptian Muslims under his tyrannical rule; the Camp David Accords; and Sadat’s imprisonment of Islamists a month earlier.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  In the house’s vast, empty great room, its plate glass wall overlooking the ashen expanse of the burn zone and beyond it the shore’s rolling dunes where the wreck of the destroyer Tecumseh —which had run aground when its dying crew attempted to scuttle it—lay heeled over and beached, two women Fran recognized from the handful of city council meetings she’d attended were seated at a folding table with two others she didn’t know, one in her late thirties or early forties, her coarse black mane of hair thrown over one shoulder and half her skull cropped down to stubble, the other tall and broad-shouldered, a swimmer’s body, absorbed in conversation with a younger TERF kneeling beside her chair. “Francine Fine and Nam-joo Kim,” said the girl who’d led them in. “From the bunker.” “You made it,” said one of the councilwomen. She looked tired, her large frame slumped, dark circles beneath her eyes. “Any trouble getting into town?” “Can we skip talking about the weather?” The older TERF stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray in front of her. “Come on, sit down. I’m not sleeping here and I don’t want to drive back to Boston in the dark.” The other stranger turned back to the table as Fran and Nam-joo took their seats, her whispered conversation ended. Fran nearly froze. That short blond hair. That stupid flower tattoo. And in her nose, its belled ends shining, a septum piercing. Ah, she thought. Fuck. VI. Dirty Work VI DIRTY WORK Indi knelt on a blanket beside Mackenzie’s snoring bulk, trying to jerk him off. She wanted to do it before the Temazepam faded—she had no idea how potent it was after three years in storage, or how his metabolism would handle it. She’d strapped him down just in case. The hardest part was handling the barbs, the dozens of short, bony protrusions growing from his cock. Only with thick rubber electrician’s gloves and enough Vaseline to make getting any kind of grip on him at all a nightmare had she been able to start working his shaft without fear of getting snagged and cut. “He close?” Mariana asked anxiously. The short, squat woman leaned over Indi’s shoulder. “He close to finish?” “Yes,” Indi snapped. “Stop hovering.” Mariana moved away, muttering to herself under her breath. From the corner of her eye, Indi caught the gleam of fluorescent light off polished rosary beads. Stupid fucking Catholics. The only thing they’re right about is that there’s just one god. She looked at the cock in her hand, at its thick veins and the flaking scabs and ingrown hairs at its base. But it’s not their god. Not that fussy lawyer. This is Durga’s world. We’re just living in it.

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

  How great the contrast between this position of the church and the time of her persecution but scarcely passed! What a revolution of opinion in bishops who had once feared the Roman emperor as the worst enemy of the church, and who now greeted the same emperor in his half barbarous attire as an angel of God from heaven, and gave him, though not yet even baptized, the honorary presidency of the highest assembly of the church! After a brief salutatory address from the bishop on the right of the emperor, by which we are most probably to understand Eusebius of Caesarea, the emperor himself delivered with a gentle voice in the official Latin tongue the opening address, which was immediately after translated into Greek, and runs thus:1322 "It was my highest wish, my friends, that I might be permitted to enjoy your assembly. I must thank God that, in addition to all other blessings, he has shown me this highest one of all: to see you all gathered here in harmony and with one mind. May no malicious enemy rob us of this happiness, and after the tyranny of the enemy of Christ [Licinius and his army] is conquered by the help of the Redeemer, the wicked demon shall not persecute the divine law with new blasphemies. Discord in the church I consider more fearful and painful than any other war. As soon as I by the help of God had overcome my enemies, I believed that nothing more was now necessary than to give thanks to God in common joy with those whom I had liberated. But when I heard of your division, I was convinced that this matter should by no means be neglected, and in the desire to assist by my service, I have summoned you without delay. I shall, however, feel my desire fulfilled only when I see the minds of all united in that peaceful harmony which you, as the anointed of God, must preach to others. Delay not therefore, my friends, delay not, servants of God; put away all causes of strife, and loose all knots of discord by the laws of peace. Thus shall you accomplish the work most pleasing to God, and confer upon me, your fellow servant,1323 an exceeding great joy." After this address he gave way to the (ecclesiastical) presidents of the council1324 and the business began. The emperor, however, constantly, took an active part, and exercised a considerable influence.