Feature May 8, 2000/Volume 5, Number 32 The New Upper Class by David Brooks
If you'd like to be tortured with dignity and humiliated with respect, you really ought to check out the Internet newsletter of the Arizona Power Exchange, an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services to what is now genteelly known as the leather community. For example, on August 3, according to last summer's newsletter, there was a discussion and humiliation session. On August 6, at 7 p.m., there was a workshop on caning. The next night, the Bondage Sadomasochism Personal Growth and Support Group met with Master Lawrence, while on August 10, Carla helped lead a discussion on high-heel and foot worship. All of these meetings were to be conducted with the maturity embodied in the organization's mission statement: "Treating the S&M, B&D and D&S experience with acceptance, caring, dignity and respect." Dignity and respect are important when you're tied up on the ground worshipping someone's boot.
The organization, which goes by the acronym APEX, has a seven-member board of directors, a long list of officers and administrators, and a web page staff to design the Internet site, which is more demure than you'd expect from your average Rotary Club. APEX sponsors charity drives. There's a special support group for submissives who are too shy to vocalize the sort of submission they like. There's a seminar on S&M and the law. There are 12-step meetings for sadists and masochists recovering from substance abuse. Finally, there are outreach efforts to build coalitions with other bondage and domination groups nationwide.
When you read through the descriptions of the APEX workshops, you are struck by how much attention is devoted to the catering of these affairs. Topics like nude gagging are supposed to evoke images of debauched de Sades, but in this crowd paddling and punishment are made to sound more akin to wine tasting or bird watching. You imagine a group of off-duty high-school guidance counselors and other responsible flossers standing around in nothing but a leather girdle and their orthotics, discussing the merits and demerits of foreign versus domestic penile clamps. It's all so temperate and responsible. It's so bourgeois.
Sex, especially adventurous sex, used to be the great transgressive act. Dissolute aristocrats would gather their whips and manacles and repair to the palace attic to flout middle-class morality. Bohemians would throw off the fetters of respectability and explore the joys of Free Love. Radical sex was a direct assault on the supposedly puritanical strictures of mainstream society.
But today, that is obsolete. And it's not only organizations like APEX that try to gentrify norm-challenging eros and make it responsible and edifying. There is now a thriving industry that caters to people who want to practice bizarre but respectable sex. Henry Miller was once an affront to decency, but now there are shelves and shelves of Barnes & Noble erotica that owe more to the Iowa Writer's Workshop than to any Left Bank underground cell. There are high-minded sex journals that advertise in the back of tasteful magazines like Harper's. There are so many academic theoreticians writing about sexual transgressions that orgies must sometimes resemble Apache dances at tourist season, performed less for the joy of the thing than to please the squads of Culture Studies professors who have flown in to quote Derrida.
In short, over the past few years, Americans of the educated class have domesticated lust by enshrouding it in high-mindedness. They have taken perverted sex, which for centuries has been thought to be arousing or sinful or possibly dangerous, and they have attempted to make it socially constructive.
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