SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrew Bast
Stripping Down Sadomasochism
Nov 7, 2008
Reading Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” got me thinking about tops and bottoms. Hardly a coincidence that I got hung up on how she, like only the best can, actually wrote her essay upside down. Put another way, her thesis, her point, her big idea, contrary to convention, doesn’t come in the first or second paragraph. It comes at the end.
With the disturbing description of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Sontag demonstrates the distance thirty years has put between the Third Reich and popular culture. Next, she describes a particular kind of cultural embrace of Nazism. That is, sexually. And in the final paragraph when she finally lays all her cards on the table, we get, “It should not be surprising that [sadomasochism] has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years . . . The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”
Professor Kaplan tries to poke a hole in Sontag’s essay. After suggesting that Sontag needed to make Last of the Nuba and SS Regalia together “stick,” Kaplan says Sontag actually left something missing from her analysis: the intellectual field of postcolonial studies. (Though she concedes that the field itself was still “about to emerge” at the time Sontag took on this particular perversity.) Well, a hole? Not quite. Surely, Kaplan is right to question soft rehabilitation in liberal democracies (for instance, why these days do all these “liberal hawks” still have jobs?) but Sontag’s essay is not anthropological in taking on photos of Sudanese natives. It’s anthropological in trying to figure out why people were dressing up like Nazis and getting it on.
“Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized,” Sontag wrote of the SS role-players. “Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the décor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone.” Nazism at a distance, that is.
Sadomasochism today is prime-time television fare. Nothing could be more mass-culture. Fetishizing Nazism, not so much. (Though Tom Cruise will soon be on the big screen in 1944-era German army regalia.) More vital from Sontag’s essay is the tying of fucking—in its most distant experience, “most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love”—to a relationship of master and slave. Strip coitus down from all social convention, and that’s what’s left, domination?
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