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Title: A Defense of Masochism by Anita Phillips ISBN: 0-312-19258-4 Publisher: St Martins Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $22.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (3 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: How Narcissism Appropriates Suffering
Comment: The contempt for non-violent sexuality that resonates throughout this book - its disparagement of "vanilla", of those who, according to the author, feel bound to remain in "the missionary position" for the whole of their doubtless stultifyingly fearful and unadventurous sexual lives - ought to be enough to alert the reader that Something Is Up.

This is a book about sexual superiority: about the "heightened" sensitivity, eroticism, creativity and ethical awareness of people whose pleasure of an afternoon is to be tied up and beaten.

"Ethical awareness" here may be taken to mean a studied indifference to the inequities of race, class, gender and compulsory heterosexuality, paraded under the label of "tolerance", and a tiresomely repetitive advocacy of "consent" as the last word in sexual politics. "Privilege" does not appear to be a word in Phillips' vocabulary, although there are a great many sentences one could make with it that would very aptly describe the inordinate complacency that pervades her writing.

Phillips' one-up-manship is largely predicated on her ability to contemplate Cleland's _Fanny Hill_ without either guffawing incredulously or rushing off to join a revolutionary lesbian separatist faction. She demonstrates an abundant verbal intelligence, but clearly lacks the wit to tell the masturbatory fantasies of a male author apart from the deepest recesses of feminine desire (or, to labour the point, to understand that "the deepest recesses of feminine desire" is a category invented for the purposes of male masturbatory fantasy, much as Pauline Reage invented, in _The Story of O_, a delectable fantasy of female masochistic desire for the amusement of her "lover").

This is an insufferably smug and collusive book. It may have made Maureen Freely feel very good about herself; it mostly confirmed my suspicion that most sadomasochists are up to little more than that perennial leisure activity of the middle classes, taking a holiday in other people's misery.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Defense of Masochism
Comment: It is courageous, it is beautifully written!

Rating: 3
Summary: Limited view
Comment: Ms. Phillips presents some interesting thoughts but they are limited to her personal viewpoint. Her writting is difficult to read and does not back up her theories with any facts or studies. It is an incomplete study.