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Declared winner of the internet (YM, 5 June 2009).

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mario the epicurean

Calls for “field of power” map of Park Slope, posts interesting response to Mark’s essay.

Now then, sex. Whatever else sex is, it’s more complicated than Greif thinks. In fact, it’s hard not to read his anti-domination discourse as this proclaimed sex-radical’s inadvertent confession of vanillahood. Does Greif not know that some unknowable number of people, perhaps a majority, gets some sexual charge from the image of domination itself? Has he no idea how many people, men and women, want to be whipped, spanked, cuffed, pretend-raped, pissed on, shit on, kicked in the balls, trampled, made to lick boots, tickled unto torture? Has he no idea how many people want to do these things to others? Again, it’s impossible to say how prevalent this is, but there’s a lot of it out there. All sex, as Freud taught, is fetish, and all fetish is a swerve from nature. I well know the rejoinder to this: fetish is all false consciousness, it’s the distortion of the healthy sexual impulse that comes with a culture of domination. But read Dialectic of Enlightenment again: culture is domination, and not avoidably either.

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