SUBMISSIVE HETEROSEXUAL SODOMY

Toni Bentley's much reviewed (twice by the liberal and prestigious NY Times) book "The Surrender," about submissive heterosexual sodomy is hard to enjoy if you're a civilized human being, but if you're a liberal from the West Side of Manhattan it just might be very titillating. Perhaps even it might be a tonic for liberals who want to shove it back in the face of all those red state conservatives who struggle mightily with their own relationships but nevertheless managed to steal the recent election, in part anyway, with their old fashioned traditional values.

If the book pretended to be pornography you might say, "fine," but Toni Bentley is too proud to be just another pornographer, she's wants to be a revolutionary intellectual too. She apparently got most of her training with the New York City Ballet; under Balanchine (also West Side Manhattan), whose family values took a scram jet ride in the opposite direction while he was moving forward as the greatest choreographer of his time while sleeping with most of his obedient little charges.

As communism is the ultimate perversion of economics, this book perhaps represents the ultimate perversion of family values. If you want a superficial allusion to every known sexual neurosis and psychosis from Caligula to Freud to Norman Mailer you can find it crammed into this 200 page, large type, wide spaced book, guaranteed. If you want one single allusion to the value of a connection between sex and love and family and civilization you won't find it, not even one word, guaranteed. What you do get is to sadly witness a sexual affair between two perverts so thoroughly demented by modern liberalism that the idea of being in love, forming a family, and raising children as the ultimate expression of that love, never crosses their innocent little minds. If Ms. Bentley had written the rules, instead of Jews and Christians, one does not really wonder what might have happened to civilization.

Interestingly when Ms. Bentley's affair ends in a nasty love triangle she seems to be very hurt, much like a civilized human being. But this is not the pain of a family lost, of children from a broken home, of a commitment not kept, from fear of growing old alone, or facing eternity alone, or from having to find meaning in a new relationship when she never wanted a new relationship, it is merely the pain of sexual pleasure lost. In a way though it is still a great pain for her to bear. When all of the natural social aspirations between people are reduced to sex, sex is all there is. When it dies because it has no context or larger meaning, when a new alliance has sexual newness as a value infinitely more important than family values, the loss of sex, oddly, can be the loss of life , but sadly a life no more connected to civilization than a prostitute is connected to a customer.

We can thank Ms. Bentley for showing us the future, at least the liberal future of liberated, uncivilized, carefree, anonymous, abortion laden sex, fueled by Britney Spears style commercialism, our bankrupt souls, and a lot of poor thinking. But, it is only the future if we continue to choose it. comments: bje1000@aol.com