Over and over it happens, like incurable migraine. A public figure slips
up and says something that One Doesn’t Say, something that upsets one
tribe or other of the sacred and sensitive—blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals,
American Indians. The offender is always a white male. The press attack him
like hyenas dragging down a crippled zebra. Invariably, he apologizes profusely,
squirming and abasing himself. Invariably he says he didn’t mean it,
though invariably he did. Invariably he reminds me of nothing so much as a
puppy who knows he shouldn’t have wet the rug.
It is positively kinky. It is D&S, domination and submission, which is
sadomasochism without the whips but with the same delight in abasement and
abasing.
Truth has nothing to do with these curious performances. When the former
president of Harvard, Larry Summers, said that men were better than women
at mathematics, he was stating a fact, well settled among those in the field
and consonant with historical performance and current experience. (And if
he had been wrong, so what?) Yet he spent weeks publicly writhing and licking
the feet of any woman who couldn’t outrun him.
It wasn’t honest apology. It was something much more twisted.
Nor are justice and decency even innocent bystanders. Just now someone called
Don Imus, a radio jock whom I have never heard, is wriggling on the rug and
ritually whimpering. It seems that he described some black girls’ basketball
team as “nappy-haired hos.” Offensive, yes, but if a black woman
had said something similar of a white boys’ basketball team, if there
were any, nothing would have happened. These little circuses are about power,
humiliation, and nothing else.
Note further that many of these submissives did not need to submit. I doubt
that Larry Summers would have faced destitution if he had simply said, “Facts
are facts. Would you like to examine the evidence?” Instead he willingly—I
am inclined to say “eagerly”—groveled. It would hardly have
been worse if he had paraded about in diapers. (I can only assume that he
didn't think of it.)
What is really going on here?
A couple of decades back in Washington I stumbled onto a social club of hobbyist
sadomasochists. An interesting group—nice folk actually, utterly harmless,
and safe around children, but they enjoyed whipping each other. Although their
parties looked impressively wicked, they were less dangerous than driving
in rush hour.
They flagellators were heavy on Catholics and Jews, which they explained
as having something to do with a sense of guilt, and heavy on programmers,
The were highly intelligent. (Maybe you can’t be twisted unless you
have something to twist.)
I of course had heard of sadomasochism, but hadn’t thought about it
much, and regarded it as a kink that a few people had and everybody else didn’t.
The people in the club had thought about it. They believed that dominance
and submission constitute a profound well of human behavior, present to some
extent in all. They insisted that the same drives that led them to paddle
each other were easily discerned in people who had no idea why there were
behaving as they were.
I asked them what proportion of the population had such tendencies to any
great extent. They didn’t know. People do not readily reveal their sexual
fantasies. However, they pointed to the popularity of kinky books like The
Story of O, to clearly sadomasochistic overtones in all manner of movies and
literature, and to the large amounts of kinky porn on the web. More to the
point here, they said that the need to dominate or submit (or both at different
times) doesn’t always take overtly sexual form.
I shortly lost touch with them, but began watching for evidence. It was there.
For example, I remembered some committee hearing I had attended on the Hill—probably
of the House Armed Services Committee. One of the members burst into slavering,
flowery, sycophantic praise of the chairman. There was no obvious reason for
it. I found it embarrassing. The chairman then slapped him down, humiliatingly,
in front of a room full of people. At the time it struck me as truly strange.
Men usually don’t treat each other that way without blows being exchanged.
Later I decided that “kinky” was the right word.
There is much of this in the military. It is one thing to have a boss and
follow orders. It is another to stand at rigid attention in front of your
boss, feet at a forty-five degree angle, thumbs along the seams of your trousers,
motionless, staring straight ahead, and waiting until such time as your boss
says, ”At ease.”
It isn’t discipline. It is D&S.
In the more usual example, either blacks are humiliating white men, whom
they do not like, or women are humiliating men, whom they do not like. (Yes,
yes, degrees and exceptions.) Note the efforts here and there to remove urinals
to make men sit down to pee, or the recording in the men’s room of the
restaurant warning men, in a female voice, not to drive drunk.
Of course outright, non-hobbyist sadism runs strongly through human behavior,
as any reader of history must notice. The burning alive of witches and heretics,
often while fully conscious, was long practiced by Christianity. Such things
drew large crowds. Bullfighting is an ornamented form of torturing cattle.
Frequently, torture has been engaged in for the sheer fun of it, as in the
case of American Indians. Beheading has always been a crowd-pleaser. Railroading
Don Imus is hardly in the same category, but the underlying drive is the same.
The press, without whom none of this would happen, are not just hypocritical.
They positively revel in watching the victims crawl. Their indignation is
bogus. I have known all manner of reporters and editors. Few of them are shocked,
appalled, horrified and so on at “slurs.” They are not delicates.
After forty years in a big-city newsroom, they know the score.
They also know that a lot of the alleged slurs aren’t. For example,
when a white football coach says that blacks are better runners, it is (a)
true and (b) a compliment. Yet when this happened, the response of the press
always was a delighted “Gotcha!” after which they dog-packed the
guy.
Always they pile on, gloating, enjoying the victim’s torment, waiting
for him to break. He always does.
Finally, I notice that the ideal male of film and print of today is the metrosexual
man, hairless, slender and adolescent, and chipmunk-faced—never John
Wayne. Humphrey Bogart would have said, “Can it, sister.” Not
Larry Summers, who seems more comfortable on his knees. We begin to make a
Weimar bordello look staid.
