The College Fix

Three new books published by academic presses use lofty intellectual theories to describe strange deviant sex (kink, bondage, and erotic masochism) as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Camile Paglia has reviewed the books for The Chronicle for Higher Education. It’s not pretty:

Gender-theory groupthink leads to bizarre formulations such as this, from Weiss’s introduction: “SM performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations.” The preposterousness of that would have been obvious had Weiss ever dipped into the voluminous works of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and important writers of the past three centuries and a pivotal influence on Nietzsche. But incredibly, none of the three authors under review seem to have read a page of Sade. It is scandalous that the slick, game-playing Foucault (whose attempt to rival Nietzsche was an abysmal failure) has completely supplanted Sade, a mammoth cultural presence in the 1960s via Grove Press paperbacks that reprinted Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal essay, “Must We Burn Sade?”

Weiss is so busy with superfluous citations that she ignores what her interviewees actually tell her when it doesn’t fit her a priori system. Thus any references to religion or spirituality are passed by without comment. She also refuses to consider or inquire about any psychological aspect to her subjects’ sexual proclivities, no matter how much pain is inflicted or suffered. She declares that she rejects the “etiological approach”: Any search for “the causation of or motivation for BDSM desires” would mean that “marginalized sexualities” must be “explained and diagnosed as individual deviations.” To avoid any ripple in the smooth surface of liberal tolerance, therefore, flogging, cutting, branding, and the rest of the menu of consensual torture must be assumed to be meaning-free—no different than taking your coffee with cream or without. (These books approvingly quote BDSM players comparing what they do to extreme but blatantly nonsexual sports like rock climbing and sky diving.) Weiss’s neutrality here would be more palatable if she were indeed merely recording or chronicling, but her own biases are palpably invested in her avoidance of religion and her moralistic stands on economics.

Read the full review here.

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