I’ve heard of “white knighting,” but someone named Owen Pallet just galloped into Facebook on an albino Clydesdale.
I used to joke that first the Catholic Church made sex “bad,” but after Vatican II, with NFP and all that, they succeeded in making it boring instead.
On an amazingly similar note, Owen Pallet’s contribution to #Ghomeshiquiddick includes a description of BDSM that I’ve noticed has become the default, er, position of the last ten years at least:
“They were engaged in BDSM role-play.” This: this is something I need to talk about.
The beauty of BDSM relationships is that the power is always in the hands of the sub. BDSM and choke play is a subversion of male violence.
To hear that anybody has been abusing the BDSM power relationship for the purpose of engaging in non-consensual violence-against-women is horrifying.
That is not the point of BDSM. BDSM is in fact about the exact opposite thing. It is about repurposing acts of violence into creating a power dynamic of fucking EQUALITY.
There no way that millions of women panted their way through 50 Shades of Grey — and The Story of O, and any number of interchangeable historical romance novels — because they were turned on by “equality” and a “subversion of male violence.”
Is it really necessary for the busybody feminists and their beta male worker bees to turn everything inside out, to fit some theory they learned in school, to make everything “the exact opposite thing” of what it was before they were, unfortunately, born?
Of course, it didn’t really start with them.
Remember when mid-20th century painters stopped painting things and started painting theories?
I’m pretty cerebral, but I’m still astonished many people are compelled to mediate their existence via other people’s once-removed theories (and now, gadgets) rather than engaging The Thing Itself.
Back to Catholicism:
For whatever perverse reason, while reading Pallet’s earnest effort to wring the sex out of sex, I thought of Flannery O’Connor’s famous letter penned in 1955:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life). She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’
