Die grausame Lust

Pop music, advertising, fashion, and the cultural industry are filled with symbols and scenarios of cruel pleasure. Whenever a prostitute is depicted, it is as a punishing dominatrix, and the business of handcuffs, gags, and whips is booming. Academics and intellectuals speak reverently of the dark sides of sexuality. In this book, Ulrike Heider delves into the philosophies and ideologies surrounding the phenomenon of sadomasochism. Her book is a critical and enlightening response to the erotic irrationalism of philosophers and writers such as the Marquis de Sade, his student Georges Bataille, and his student Pauline Rèage, the author of "The Story of O." The thought leaders of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, bestselling author Erika Leonard, and queer icon Paul B. Preciado also face criticism. The author identifies recurring features of the ideologies associated with violence-laden pleasure as often being unabashed misanthropy, authoritarian educational concepts, blasphemously disguised religious needs, and the complex of guilt and atonement. Pain and humiliation serve as punishments reminiscent of the Middle Ages, and eroticism is entirely captivated by its prohibition. The liberation of sexuality under unfree, i.e., capitalist conditions was and is the opposite of a sexual revolution in an emancipatory sense, which has never occurred. Today, it promotes an image of physical love that is shaped by the worst characteristics of the society we live in, marked by inequality and competition, power, powerlessness, and power struggles, extending to war.