Judgment Day

Judgment Day, according to those who were convinced the world would come to an end around 6PM this past Saturday, is when believers “…expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture” (“Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending,” NYT, 5/19/11). A different kind of Judgment Day will occur when the jury hands down a verdict in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. In the first case, judgment leads to the Gates of St. Peter. In the second, it will in all likelihood lead to the gates of prison. Perhaps the roots of Strauss-Kahn’s epic downfall lie in the I.M.F.'s personnel policies, which the Times excerpted in a separate piece: “‘Intimate personal relationships, between supervisors and subordinates, do not, in themselves, constitute harassment’” (“At I.M.F., Men on Prowl and Women on Guard,” NYT, 5/19/11). Was this credo by any chance lifted from the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom? The word subordinate would send a frisson of pleasure down the spine of any member of the Eulenspiegel Society. Here is the first line of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” The I.M.F., “the lender of last resort for governments that need money,” is an organization that employs many economists. Perhaps they would do well to go back to the author of The Wealth of Nations in proposing guidelines for how members of their little society, a microcosm of the world they purport to help, should comport themselves.

The Dukes of Hazard

The January/February issue of The Atlantic ran a piece by Caitlin Flanagan called “The Hazards of Duke,” about Karen Owen, a Duke student who produced a PowerPoint thesis detailing her promiscuous sexual activity with 13 of the university’s athletes. The allusion to the popular ’80s television series is more than incidental. The Dukes of Hazzard made light comedy out of a pair of moonshiners, while Karen Owen’s story involves blackout drinking that results in anonymous and sometimes painful sex. The subject of brutal sex was reprised in the same issue of The Atlantic in an article on Internet porn called “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper. In the piece, Vargas-Cooper describes a one-night-stand of her own that didn’t go well: “…in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, ‘Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.’” Needless to say, the old adage “if it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done” still holds true. There are parts of The Canterbury Tales that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?