Bobos in Paradise The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

Author:David Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1999-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Pleasure

IF YOU’D like to be tortured and whipped 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 a recent August 3, according to the summer 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. A week later a visiting lecturer came to discuss “blood sports.” All of these meetings were to be conducted with the sort of mature high-mindedness 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 worshiping someone’s boot.

The organization, which goes by the acronym APEX, has a seven-member board of directors and a long list of officers and administrators. There’s a recording secretary, a treasurer, an archivist, an orientation officer, a logistics officer, and a Web page staff to design its Internet site, which is more demure than the one that might be operated by 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 catering these affairs. Topics like nipple piercing and nude gagging are supposed to evoke images of debauched de Sades, but in this crowd paddling and punishing are made to sound more akin to bird watching or wine tasting. 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. Peasants would slobber their way through lewd drunken orgies. Bohemians would throw off the fetters of respectability and explore the joys of Free Love.

But today that is obsolete. And it’s not only organizations like APEX that try to gentrify norm-challenging Eros to make it responsible and edifying. There is now a thriving industry that caters to people who want to practice moral sex. There are shelves and shelves of Barnes & Noble erotica that owe more to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop than to Hustler magazine.

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