[lbo-talk] Taming Sex Again (was Re: Privelege)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 1/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 8, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
>
> > My own experience is that leftists hate on kinky BDSM sex ALL the
> > time, maybe even more than honkie america.  I've gotten in so many
> > arguments about this with radicals over the years.  It's so
> > strange.  Why do so many leftos have mean things to say about
> > BDSM?  Can someone on this list make whatever argument there is to
> > make, about BDSM being bad or fundamentally oppressive or
> > whatever?  I just can't imagine what intellectual content there
> > could be to any such assertion.
>
> It's obvious, no? BDSM is violent and hierarchical. Even worse, it
> eroticizes violence and hierarchy, even if in a scripted, theatrical
> fashion. We're supposed to be gentle and egalitarian in our desires;
> anything else is unauthorized and deeply suspect. Humans shouldn't
> discharge their aggressive urges through play; we shouldn't have them
> at all.

The way leftists -- practitioners as well as supporters -- discuss and
defend BDSM, though, it essentially reduces it to gentle, egalitarian
desires that promote virtue within the limits of political liberalism:
consensual play between mentally competent adults, good for
intellectual enlightenment and community building.  So, the paradox is
that supposedly kinky sex, in discourse on the Left, becomes not so
kinky after all.  "Bad" becomes "good," which is to say, on the way to
becoming boring.  Such a defense suggests an anxiety that pleasure
still isn't its own justification even for a harmless activity, a
curiously un-hedonistic defense of hedonism, taming sex again.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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