Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology by Alison Moore (review)

In this groundbreaking and eminently readable study, Alison Moore addresses the ways in which certain nonnormative sexual modalities—here the fantasies and practices subsumed under the umbrella term “sadomasochism”—have been used to shore up a dominant mythic narrative of historical progress, precisely by being made to stand in for political degeneration or “barbarism.” In examining the alignment at various historical moments between sadism and political violence (Nazism in particular), Moore expertly demonstrates the workings of an ideological “attempt to bind sexual practices to a vision of historical teleology or social evolution” (1) throughout modernity and its afterlives.

The methodological toolkit chosen by Moore to explore the deployment of sexual myths in modernity is explained and ably justified in the introduction. The study is guided primarily by the pursuit of genealogies of ideas, a method taken from intellectual history. However, this is tempered by a broader cultural history approach of considering a plethora of discursively disparate “texts”—such as pornography, creative literature, cinema, and political writing—as historical sources. And although Moore chooses to focus on “myths” of sexuality rather than “discourses,” and although she claims that the book is “not a particularly Foucauldian history” (16), the influence of both a Foucauldian approach to the history of sexuality and a post-Foucauldian analysis of diagnostic power, such as that offered by Ian Hacking, is much in evidence.¹

The book is organized into two halves (not formally divided as such) and comprises eight chapters. The first part (chapters 1–3) considers the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century contexts in which sexological science and psychoanalysis established “the perversions” as discrete discursive categories and pursued a belief in the idea of degeneration theory, which held that Western civilization was tending toward moral, medical, and sexual decline. Together, chapters 2 and 3 constitute a nuanced and subtle rereading of the Freudian and post-Freudian teleology, showing how individual pathology was projected onto culture in late Freud and his followers, setting the tone for the emphasis on sexual violence in later examinations of Nazism. The second half of the book (chapters 4–8) examines a range of post–World War II responses to the defeat of Nazism and the continued sexualization of politics. It focuses on intellectual, cultural, and creative sources, including the writers of the Frankfurt School, the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Italian neorealist cinema, and Anglo-American radical feminism.

Of all the chapters of the book, the eighth and final one, which serves as the conclusion, is probably the finest. It is crystal clear in articulating a swingeing critique of a whole modernist mode of thinking that has made lazy and prurient leaps between genocidal cruelty and unusual sexual practices, such that it “both renders ethically suspect consensual forms of pleasure [and] predetermines genocide as an aberrant expression of barbarism within modernity” (231). Moore urges, as an ethical as well as a scholarly imperative, increased critical reflection about how we continue casually to use sexual and political language in interchangeable and unnuanced ways. The book on the whole and this chapter in particular manage deftly to combine erudite historical scholarship with a genuine and impassioned commitment to respect for what Gayle Rubin has memorably called “benign sexual variation.”² It is this finely handled combination that makes Moore’s study the best work I have read on sadomasochism, a sexual phenomenon that, as the author notes in her introduction, has become a somewhat fashionable topic in the post–Fifty Shades of Grey world, one deserving of much more careful analysis and understanding than it habitually receives.³

If the book has a weakness, it would be its sometimes rather haphazard copyediting or proofreading. Referencing is approximate in places, with some names being misspelled (Diana Fuss appears as “Dianna” Fuss on page 5; Andrea Dworkin becomes “Angela” Dworkin in the index). And the titles of several works in the bibliography...