Most people I know into S/M are informed by theory, by queer studies, by Freudian psychoanalysis - in short, by academic rationalization - no longer hampered by relegation to fringe status. But they aren't the people I know that enjoy it most. The person I know that enjoys it most enters S/M through her heart, her body, her senses, her deeper emotions, while all the others enter with their mind, their irony, their neurosis, their anger and their pain. This isn't to say that everyone into S/M doesn't enjoy it, they wouldn't be consenting so much if they didn't, or that S/M isn't a valid form of catharsis. However, they enjoy it differently, and less deeply, when it is as much a political statement as it is a physical and emotional experience. It's the mind/body split right in your bedroom.

And as for affection - deconstruction and simulation took care of that, too. Now, it is impossible to say the words "I love you" to someone without it being considered an ironic act, or a reiteration of learned signs, or some other textual academic construance of emotion. Emotion! To think that love of all beautiful things would come under attack by theory; sex comes out of the closet, gets separated from many previous partners like love, [ab]normalcy, marriage, heterosexuality, and power, but in the process is completely reconfigured.

And love, that sociopolitical amalgamation of neurotransmitters evolutionarily created to force procreation and culturally constructed to subjugate women and the poor, that thing that we've imagined we'd wanted but forgot was actually a transaction of capital. Is there space for a postmodern romanticism? Is there space for the reconnection of the mind and the body and the external world, allowing true feeling to return? Is there room for a Marxist spirituality, a Derridean holistic sense?

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