/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14271687]

Can someone post critiques/refutations of this book please?

A friend of mine is obsessed with it thanks to the whole nofap november meme and won't stop praising it and treats it like an actual academic text. I haven't read it myself but I know it's about 2 steps below pop-sci shit and I'm not going to wade through 700 pages of E Michael Jones just to point out where it specifically goes wrong.

Bonus points for actual academic texts that counter its theses.

[Anonymous No.14271692]

>>14271687
>Can someone post critiques/refutations of this book please?
you can't; it's correct

[Anonymous No.14271693]

>>14271687
what about reading the fucking book and refuting it by yourself?

[Anonymous No.14271695]

>>14271687
E. Michael Jones got refuted by Doovid

[Anonymous No.14271706]

>>14271687
>I know it's about 2 steps below pop-sci shit and I'm not going to wade through 700 pages of E Michael Jones just to point out where it specifically goes wrong.
Seems like you are only slightly less retarded than your friend anon.

[Anonymous No.14271811]

>>14271687
I won't "refute" the book, in fact I agree with its basic premises (what do you not like about it? What does your friend actually say about it?). It is deeply flawed however so I can offer plenty of critiques.

Just to get it out of the way, the book is clearly stitched together without the benefit of a serious editor.

Jones could have been more explicit about how Catholic orthodoxy would have prevented some of the problems he highlights in the book. For instance, when discussing the Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Jones insinuates that her entire subversive career would never have happened had her first husband, in keeping with Catholic teachings, not remarried after she divorced him and thus been around to re-marry her when she regretted her decision. It's dumb of him to tiptoe around this; perhaps he still had some aspirations of more mainstream acceptance when he wrote LD and didn't want to come on too strong with the Catholicism. Really, the larger criticism is that he is more interested in a hodgepodge critique of the sexual "liberation" than in offering solutions.

My biggest gripe however is that Jones conflates two different if related problems: how sexual immorality _naturally_ enslaves those who engage in it, and how it is _systematically and deliberately used_ as a tool of control.

He mostly focuses on the latter, especially the origins of the sexual revolution in therapeutic ideology, and the therapeutic's moral and philosophical roots in a perverted form of the Sacrament of Penitence used in secret societies -- Jones specifically calls out the Bavarian Illuminati -- to blackmail and control disciples. Some of the links in this pedigree are sketchy if not outright speculative.

>Bonus points for actual academic texts that counter its theses.
lol

[Anonymous No.14271819]

Fuck off coomer go jerk off in the corner

[Anonymous No.14271859]

i coom whenever i choose to

[Anonymous No.14271889]

>>14271687
The books central thesis, that the dominant powers in society have been using sexuality and pornography as a means of control and domination, is trivially true and obvious to any who has reflected on the sheer variety of free pornography readily available, not only to adults but, for most of us, from our early teenage years. The anti-Semitic aspects of it are nonsense and genuinely harmful but it doesn't sound like that's what your friend is into/you haven't mentioned that as your main concern (and if you're friend is being openly antisemitic you should be more concerned with that than with what he does with his dick)

I know this has been said so many times before, and I know the NoFap people can be annoying and immature. But seriously man, why does what *he* does with his dick bother you to this extent? Why is it a sore topic, so much so that you feel the need to intervene to make him touch himself more often?

At the end of the day, NoFap is an experiment. Some people will tell you if you do it you'll get cancer; others will tell you do it women will flock to you from miles around; they're both obviously full of shit. But if you have no inclination to try it for yourself or, worse, don't think you'd be able to do a couple of months of NoFap, you're not in a good situation and you probably need either a more open mind or some basic fucking willpower

Also
>actual academic text
No such thing and only bootlickers think there is

[Anonymous No.14271898]

>>14271889
what's wrong with being antisemitic?

[Anonymous No.14271960]

>>14271889
Porn is used for political control, the majority of porn producers are Jewish, and Jews are distinct ethnic and national group with their own interests. Many of them have these interests without even realizing it, meaning they'll unconsciously behave in ways that benefit their group. The complete subversion of WASP culture in the United States has been the overarching if unspoken goal of the Jewish people since WW2.

The more I read about Jews the more I realize how little that have changed over the centuries. They will subvert a country by merely acting in their own interests and when called out on it they will inevitably charge people with some irrational antisemitism as if that answers for the behavior they're being accused of.

[Anonymous No.14272047]

>>14271898
Kind of too broad a question to answer in a convincing way. Maybe you should say why you are an antisemite (or whatever you'd call it, I know that might not be how you'd want to characterise your beliefs) and I could maybe have a pop at answering that?

>>14271960
The subversion of WASP culture has been the goal of most people, including most WASP people for as long as "WASP culture" has existed. I find this stuff hard to believe because I come from a catholic background and know that ethnic hatred towards the Anglo is felt by almost everyone who isn't Anglo (as well as by many Anglos themselves)

If porn is a specifically Jewish conspiracy then why do Jewish people suffer the exact same ill effects of the sexual revolution as "WASPs". They suffer the same destruction of normal family structures, the same falling birth rates. You don't think if they were the ones doing it, even "unconsciously", then they'd do it in a way that meant they didn't suffer the ill effects of it? The argument that Jews are somehow "subverting" countries by acting in their own interests is refuted by the fact that the actions alleged of them are very much not in their own interests

Though there are undoubtedly powerful interests working behind the world of pornogrpahy, the sad reality is that the west has degenerated into a culture of death, entirely of its own accord. There may be any number of reasons for this, but placing the blame outside of western culture in some "subverting" force is just cope.

[Anonymous No.14272081]

>>14271889
>that the dominant powers in society have been using sexuality and pornography as a means of control and domination, is trivially true and obvious to any who has reflected on the sheer variety of free pornography readily available
kek society was much more hierarchal and dominated by the elite back when this stuff was barely accessible. If anything society has become more more equal as porn has become more prevalent

[Anonymous No.14272101]

>>14272047
Wee gee I guess we can't blame the Jews since other people are trying to subvert western civilization as well. The Jews are not suffering from pornography. The diaspora and Israel are just fine. The Jews took over the media and academia, but yeah, sure dude. White people did it to themselves. You're either willfully ignorant or running interference.

[Anonymous No.14272368]

>>14272101
Can we just lynch all the /pol/tards already

[Anonymous No.14272445]

>>14271687
It's crude but it's great desu.

[Anonymous No.14272529]

>>14272047
>>14271889

There's practically no discussion of Jews or Jewishness in Libido Dominandi at all. Jones notes that some of the later sexual revolutionaries were Jewish but that's about it. He makes it clear that it's not a Jewish plot.

[Anonymous No.14272732]

>>14271687
he claims martin luther was a CUMBRAIN and basically the entirety of modern intellectuals is just perverts rationalizing their desires
that's crazy

[Anonymous No.14272749]

>>14272529
yes there is, he explicitly mentions that Israeli use of pornography against the Palestinians which is something that i have never seen verified outside of one article, btw

[Anonymous No.14272766]

>>14271960
Have you read Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism? He goes into Jewish behaviors in the early modern and enlightenment periods and they were exactly the same

[Anonymous No.14273151]

>>14271687
This review DESTROYS Libido Dominandi from the point of view of another Catholic traditionalist—your friend might be more receptive to his critique.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1906990944

[Anonymous No.14273432]

>>14273151
That's a shitty review from someone who has contempt for the man. Full of cherrypicking and strawmaning.

[Anonymous No.14273448]

IMO you need to cum just to cleanse the pipes. Best with a woman but if not so be it. The important thing is to not be lustful and watch tons of porn. That is time being completely wasted.

[Anonymous No.14273452]

>>14271687
>actual academic text
this is reddit this is memes

[Anonymous No.14273469]

>>14271889
I don’t even consider myself antisemitic in a /pol/ edgelord sense but porn is literally the only Jewish product that they’re happy to not only give you for free, but actively prod you into using.
It’s not like there’s no reason for that.

[Anonymous No.14273479]

>>14272732
>Martin Luther was a cumbrain
Makes a lot of sense actually

[Anonymous No.14273481]

>>14273469
it functions by selling ads like everything else on the internet

[Anonymous No.14273482]

>>14273432
Like?

[Anonymous No.14273647]

>>14272749
That's one example from like 2003 in a book that covers from about 1650-2000. And yeah he's pretty obsessed with that particular incident. It did happen, but I think he reads too much into it or at least overemphasizes it.

If you want to read an "anti-Semitic" book by EMJ, read The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. Libido Dominandi ain't it.

[Anonymous No.14273654]

>>14272732
Yeah my biggest problem with the book is that he makes a reasonably good case that e.g. Alfred Kinsey was a cynical deviant but he doesn't do a good job of showing how common this sort of personality is.

[Anonymous No.14273660]

just point out how retarded the religion he bases on his thinking on is

[Anonymous No.14273676]

>>14273482
>Libido Dominandi is the first draft of a great work.

>The overall structure of the book—jumping from year to year, place to place, vignette to vignette—makes it hard to follow intellectual rather than a thematic elements. Given the fact that the book’s thesis is nebulous and has a tendency to change as Jones goes along

>Jones has habit of noting tacit connections between his characters rather than connecting the intellectual undercurrents which united them. This method moves along more like a conspiracy theory or a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game than scholarship. For example, in the early chapters, Jones repeatedly tries to unite the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, Abbe Barruel. It really does not work; Jones is forced to use lame narrative devices such as speculating what Mary Wollstonecraft must have been thinking while she trudged through the blood-drenched Paris streets; speculations over how affected Percy and Mary Shelley were by Sade; huge leaps of faith over the effect the good priest Barruel had on later sex perverts.

>It is Sade who Jones tries to shoehorn in most often. He suggests that the de-mastication of the Princess de Lamballe at the hands of an angry mob was in part due to the dissemination of Sade’s work.

>much of Sorokin’s analysis is so similar to Jones’s, and so much better documented and argued, that Jones can’t help suffer by comparison. For example, Sorokin actually delves into the state of marriage laws at the beginning of the French Revolution and elsewhere. From the perspective of a scholar, Jones’s elision of this topic is unforgivable.

>Unable to differentiate the sexual rationalists from the Sadists, he gives us little as to why we are mired in our current state of insanity.

All of these criticisms are correct and substantive.

[Anonymous No.14275259]

>>14273660
There are few things on this earth more cringe than reddit level atheist witticism. Do yourself a favor and stop posting this

[Anonymous No.14275265]

>>14273448
t. no understanding of human anatomy and physiology.

[Anonymous No.14275316]

>>14273660
>symbolically
yea even in your cringe comments you cant get it right

[Anonymous No.14275328]

>>14271811

> sexual immorality _naturally_ enslaves those who engage with it
> it is _systematically and deliberately used_ as a tool of control

Which texts/authors outline this clearly and concisely?

[Anonymous No.14275434]

>>14271889
you haven't read the book- it is written BEFORE jones discovered the jews.

[Anonymous No.14275465]

>>14273676
I'm >>14273432 and I agree with most part of that.His writing style and cohesion is dreadful and he extrapolates mainly on the beginning of the book. But that dude ignored all the rest of it where it shows, for example, the links between intelligence agencies, public relation, propaganda, institutions and universities. Also, he gives a solid background on personalities of the 20th century.
That comparison with Sorokin is stupid and the sexual rationalists are a direct consequence of the sadists.

[Anonymous No.14275689]

>>14275465
Is Sorokin still good though?

[Anonymous No.14275732]

I find it fascinating how "Anti-Semitism" is bad because it involves noticing that the Jews are a distinct people with interests that can conflict with those of other groups. It's like four levels of gaslighting.

[Anonymous No.14275748]

>>14272101
Im right wing myself, but the prevalence of these moronic /pol/heads has become really aggrevating. Stop blaming it on the jews, you delegitimize the entire right by swallowing 80 year old propaganda. You are not smarter than everyone else, just dogmatic.

[Anonymous No.14275781]

>>14275748
What propaganda am I swallowing? I see the antipathy that Jews have for the west and I see who finances and operates the things that deconstruct it. This has nothing to do with the right or left and at no point did I say I was smarter than anyone else. Stop your kvetching.

[Anonymous No.14275788]

>>14272081

Global inequality is the highest it's ever been.

[Anonymous No.14275794]

>>14275748
Nice try.

[Anonymous No.14275796]

>>14271898
Counter-Semitic is a more accurate way to put it. It is a natural reaction to Jewish behaviour.

[Anonymous No.14275816]

Porn is used to control people.

[Anonymous No.14275826]

>>14275732
This. Noticing Jewish behavior is to be forbidden.

[Anonymous No.14275838]

>>14272081

>society was much more hierarchal and dominated by the elite back when this stuff was barely accessible

notice that's not the argument tho. the argument isn't what was less authoritarian, it's that sexuality and pornography is one of the methods of control and domination in the modern world - a world that's ostensibly meant to be free and democratic. one might argue that it's precisely *because* of liberalism that sexuality and pornography becomes one of the main methods of control.
and there's been plenty of philosophers who've made this argument, in at least some respect, like foucault, or zizek when he talks about 'desire' or the difference between the 'authoritarianism' of the nazis and the 'totalitarianism' of the soviets.

[Anonymous No.14275845]

i mean it's all made by jews yet it's virtually all free, that should be argument enough.

[Anonymous No.14275850]

>>14275732
What would the parasites do if their hosts denied them?

[Anonymous No.14275853]

All these posts and neither a single good criticism nor any engagement with his arguments besides the same, tired anti-semitism accusation, which Jones has repeatedly dismantled. If criticizing a cabal of like-minded, ethnically united people doing unseemly things is racist, then we can't criticize the Italian mafia or Mexican cartels.

[Anonymous No.14275892]

[Anonymous No.14275968]

>>14275748
>stop blaming the jews
>blame the christians instead
LMAO

[Anonymous No.14277496]

>>14271889
>anti-semitic
my friend, you can simply look up the history of porn: the 50s/60s cuties and roughies, 70's hardcore to todays internet porn and there's jewish people writing, producing and directing this shit for 70 years, it's not a fucking conspiracy, Jews Make Porn

[Anonymous No.14278441]

>>14275328
The first part is easy: I'd recommend Augustine but practically any serious philosopher addresses this.

As for the specific use of sex as a tool of control, that's more context-dependent. Jones does a decent job providing examples of it, but where he fails is in proving the scope. If you want an old story, Samson and Delilah.

[Anonymous No.14278454]

>>14275465
>That comparison with Sorokin is stupid and the sexual rationalists are a direct consequence of the sadists.
I don't have a clue about Sorokin. I'd never even heard of him until I read that review. Have you read him, and if so should I check him out?

It may be that the "sexual rationalists" are a direct consequence of the "sadists". I think it's pretty likely personally. But Jones doesn't really prove this link. If he had LB would be a monumental book.

[Anonymous No.14278457]

>>14272749
This was widely reported at the time and is not in doubt.

[Anonymous No.14278479]

>>14277496
This, doubting Jewish overrepresentation in porn and in the battle to legalize and normalize porn is credulity theory (the opposite of conspiracy theory) on a level of doubting that the United States Air Force exists. Almost all the biggest Jewish names in the normalization of porn are major celebrities, who tell any interviewer who will speak to them that they are pursuing a political and cultural goal and not just trying to make money. Milos Forman made a freaking major feature film about this, starring "Woody" from "Frasier: The Origin."

[Anonymous No.14278551]

>>14273481
That doesn't make any sense.
Your piddling blog can help Google steal money from gullible idiots who don't understand advertising because it costs nothing to drool onto your keyboard. Porn studios on the other hand are small movie studios, with serious overhead, personnel, banking, legal, and equipment expenses. It's the only pirated entertainment where the official industry response to piracy was to give up on profit.

[Anonymous No.14279185]

Libido Dominandi is the first draft of a great work. As it is, it is a failure, suffering from shoddy writing, poor research, and a wandering and inconsistent thesis. What should be an erudite and compelling polemic against the sexual revolution—Western culture’s death knell—is an inconsistent and often unreadable mess.

A bird’s-eye view of Jones’s thesis—that our inability to control our sexual drive has been used for the purpose of political suppression—is beyond reproach. Of course, Catholic leaders have been saying the same thing for years. Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus operates as a rough outline of the book, beginning with Augustine’s distinctions between the City of Man and the City of God, and going on to condemn freemasonry. Who know if Jones himself was actually aware of his debt?

Regardless, Jones is not exactly marking new ground here. For this book to be worthwhile, it must function as a polemic which inspires the vanguard, and provides grist for later scholars. Dr. Jones’s work does neither. I was hoping for a traditionalist version of Das Kapital, but instead got a book that was barely worth finishing, let alone carrying into the trenches.

First and foremost, his writing is very, very poor. The overall structure of the book—jumping from year to year, place to place, vignette to vignette—makes it hard to follow intellectual rather than a thematic elements. Given the fact that the book’s thesis is nebulous and has a tendency to change as Jones goes along (more on that below), reading the book is a major slog.

An inquiring reader can jump to any given page to witness Jones’s lame writing. More shocking is his plain sloppiness and failure to edit himself. Just one of many many examples: On page 88, the author quotes Abbe Barruel, ending with “for men may be turned into any thing by him who knows how to take advantage of their ruling passion.” ONE PARAGRAPH LATER Jones uses the SAME EXACT QUOTE, except he finishes with the word “passions”—not “passion.” In other words, Jones repeats the exact same argument by using the same quote in succeeding paragraphs—and cannot even get the quoted material right! To call this a first draft is too kind—it is a first draft seemingly written the night before it was due! This is simply unforgivable.

[Anonymous No.14279192]

>>14279185
What about the research? A good bibliography may still be helpful even if the prose is abhorrent. But the bibliography of this 600-page behemoth is surprisingly spare, and utilizes discouragingly few primary sources. And from the get-go, I couldn’t help notice two noticeable absences from Jones’s bibliography: Camille Paglia and Pitrim Sorokin.

Paglia is an atheist and a feminist, but like Aldous Huxley before her, she understands conservatism better than most conservatives. Paglia knows the power of sex, and her Sexual Personae, for all its flaws, is one of the most compelling studies of sex ever created, and in Jones’s case could provide an undergirding to the larger theoretical construct. That Jones does not avail himself of Paglia’s work is a sign of weakness; it is here that Jones’s literary inadequacies overlap with his inadequate scholarship.

Let’s start here: Jones has habit of noting tacit connections between his characters rather than connecting the intellectual undercurrents which united them. This method moves along more like a conspiracy theory or a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game than scholarship. For example, in the early chapters, Jones repeatedly tries to unite the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, Abbe Barruel. It really does not work; Jones is forced to use lame narrative devices such as speculating what Mary Wollstonecraft must have been thinking while she trudged through the blood-drenched Paris streets; speculations over how affected Percy and Mary Shelley were by Sade; huge leaps of faith over the effect the good priest Barruel had on later sex perverts. With regards to the English liberals, it is clear that Jones simply does not respect their work enough to learn it and refute it—Paglia's work would serve him well here. More than this, the idea that later sex-mongers were inspired by the Jesuit reactionary Barruel’s is largely speculation; even if it were true, who cares? There are countless secret societies; the question is why the secret societies promoting sexual perversion ended up so popular. Instead of adequately defining the relevant intellectual undercurrents, Jones is reliant on his vignettes and weak editorializing.

[Anonymous No.14279202]

>>14279192

It is Sade who Jones tries to shoehorn in most often. He suggests that the de-mastication of the Princess de Lamballe at the hands of an angry mob was in part due to the dissemination of Sade’s work. Bunk!—would Jones suggest that the sodomizing of Col. Qaddafi at the hands of Muslims was influenced by Eva Ensler? Even in his day, Sade was a literary and intellectual mediocrity. Chesterton makes the point that Nietzcheans have existed all throughout history; the only difference between those Nietzscheans and Nietzsche himself is that only moderns were so foolish as to take the man seriously. The same with Sade. He was a talentless buffoon with a rapport to the dark undercurrents of human nature; nothing he says is particularly interesting, but for the fact that Sade was able to get away with saying it was. And yet the Marquis de Sade, who for all his inadequacy as a thinker and writer, is, as Ms. Paglia says, one of the most influential figures of the past 200 years. To understand why this particular pervert was able to gain a following is a worthwhile task. Trying to understand the pervert himself is not. And anyway, the ideas proposed by Sade—that the populace must promote sexual license in order to remain revolutionary—was not actually tried until the 20th Century—but more on that below.

Paglia is interested in the intellectual undercurrents behind the sexual revolution in a way Jones is not. Even if Paglia’s assessments are wrong, she at least attempts to give a unifying idea—an overarching story rather than a bunch of vignettes. Freud once suggested his method of psychoanalysis was used to exploit his clients (Jones, in his weak style, uses the same quote countless times); when discussing Margaret Sanger, he states that her opinions about birth control resemble the statement by Freud. This is nothing but a weak literary comparison between two people whose thoughts were greatly different. What could be the jumping-off point to a sociologically-complex theory is merely lame editorializing, pattern spotting, and name dropping.

Perhaps Paglia’s absence is a bugaboo of mine. Worse is Dr. Jones’s elision of Sorokin’s work. Sorokin, a reactionary a sociologist at Harvard, charted the decay of sexual morality in the West and elsewhere and accurately described the relationship between decaying sexual morality and the decay of society as a whole. His work is all but forgotten now—Mary Eberstadt is responsible for making me aware of his books—but it’s hard to think of another academic who could provide so much grist to Jones’s intellectual mill.

[Anonymous No.14279208]

>>14279185
>>14279202
But upon closer reflection, it becomes clear why Sorokin is not given a prominent role in this work—much of Sorokin’s analysis is so similar to Jones’s, and so much better documented and argued, that Jones can’t help suffer by comparison. For example, Sorokin actually delves into the state of marriage laws at the beginning of the French Revolution and elsewhere. From the perspective of a scholar, Jones’s elision of this topic is unforgivable. Marriage laws provide an excellent barometer of a society’s opinions about sex and the family. But again, Jones’s scant bibliography leaves his general theory with nothing but interconnected anecdotes as support.

Bad writing, poor scholarship. But how does Jones’s thesis as a whole stand up? Not all that well. Jones, in his salutary hatred for the Enlightenment, cannot draw a distinction between the Behaviorist who was truly a product of Enlightenment ideology, and Sadism, which was not.

Take the Bolshevik Revolution, the Enlightenment’s crowning achievement. In the early 20s, the Bolsheviks used sexual liberation as a cudgel against the ruling elite, and the Soviets liberalized marriage laws, decriminalized homosexuality, and in general made the nation a hotbed of sexual decadence (Jones dedicates a whole chapter to this). But as Sorokin notes (as does Jones—a credit to his honesty though not his ability to follow through with a thought), by the time Stalin came to power, sexual liberation had been condemned by the ruling Communists, with sexual immorality being seen as harmful to the nascent socialist state. In other words, insofar as sexuality had played a role in the initial overthrow of the Romanovs, the powers of sex had been curtailed by the time the Communists were solidifying their power. Most good Marxists will claim that Stalin’s plans were a betrayal of the Old Master’s conception of socialism, and that by the time of Stalin’s reforms in the 20s and 30s, the “revolution” was over. But this is self-serving; Lenin and the NEP were far more conservative, insofar that it slowed the progress of state ownership to the benefit of wealthy landowners and peasants, than Stalin’s massive land redistribution and industrialization. The revolution (tainted or not) continued into the 20s and 30s. But in readopting marriage norms and recriminalizing the perverse, by the time of Stalin’s purges, the sexual revolution in the USSR had ended.

[Anonymous No.14279216]

>>14279185

Stalin’s return to sexual conservatism saved the Soviet Union. Witness its experience in the 30s and 40s—no nation has ever been subjected to such incessant turmoil, upheaval, and slaughter. And yet the population and economic statistics in the 50s and 60s were healthy. Why was this? Because Soviet women took it upon themselves to bear and raise children. For all the drastic changes which occurred following the revolution, the women never lost sight of their sexual significance to their families and—yes—to the state. It was this commitment to sexual normalcy that saved the Soviet Union. Amazingly, it was not until the imposition of capitalism that Russian birthrates plummeted to suicidal levels.

That was Russia, but the same story played out in revolutionary France. The libertine atmosphere of the early Revolution died out quickly. By the time Robespierre rose to power, sexual liberation was not a philosophy of the ruling government. English liberals may still have held onto pipe dreams of open marriages and orgies, but the revolutionary government certainly did not. Robespierre inveighed against atheists and wantons as fervently than a pope; go to nearly any of his speeches and try to find that does not put great emphasis on public virtue. Nowhere are Sade’s perversions evident in the Terror government or its successors; truly, even the liberal madmen who composed the French government were sane enough to lock up Sade. Virtue, not sexual vice, was what the revolutionary leaders wanted from their subjects.

Was the Russian revolution an outgrowth of the French Revolution and Enlightenment? Assuredly so. But the unifying thread was a belief in the prefectability of man. Sexual liberation was used as a tool of the revolution, but not as a tool of the government. Jones seems to suggest that liberal/Enlightenment government innately desires to use its subjects sexual desires as part of its ruling philosophy. But the facts just don’t back this up. Jones’s thinking in this regard is fatally muddled.

To put it simply, Jones is not able to draw a distinction between Malthus, who studied the sexual habits of a population in order to better the material prosperity of its members, and Sade, the anarchist. Malthus is a man of the Enlightenment; Sade is a character from human prehistory. The behaviorists and eugenicists were sex rationalists like Sanger, Watson, and the Rockefellers may have had their sexual failures (Jones doles out stories of these rather too readily), but Freud, Reich, and Kinsey were clearly of another breed—modern Sadists. These two programs are not the same. The Eugenicists and birth controllers had serious, broad political programs in line with the liberal state; the Sadists did not.

[Anonymous No.14279221]

>>14279185
Sadism is not a ruling philosophy. It is innately revolutionary, but has no power to govern. Part of its attraction to the New Left is in this revolutionary character. The lament of the leftists—the true leftist, who has revolution in his blood even when he has nothing to revolt against—is that beautiful insurgencies must inevitably become ruling parties. Thus the Trotskyite calls for “eternal revolution,” desiring to keep the springs of leftism flowing. This is impossible, of course; the closest a ruling regime ever came to this was in Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. Regardless, the Trotskyite knew that the key retaining Bolshevism from turning into Stalinism was this “eternal revolution.” Sade's position comes close to this: that “the revolutionary state must promote sexual license if it is to remain revolutionary and retain its hold on power.” (p. 57). Of course, this is contradictory—a state that is revolutionary is one that is by definition not holding onto its power. Sadism is the fruit of a madman; but to put Sadists in power is a death wish.

This is the fascinating question: How did the rationalistic sexual regime of the first sexual revolutionaries transform into the wholly Sadist regime regnant in all levels of American culture? How has the Sadist impulse, which is eternally anarchic and revolutionary, come to be tolerated by the ruling class?

Jones gives us little towards answering this question. Unable to differentiate the sexual rationalists from the Sadists, he gives us little as to why we are mired in our current state of insanity. Indira Gandhi and the Chinese Communists promoted birth control; this doesn’t mean they promoted homosexuality and other ghastly perversions. Yes, they treated their citizens like rabbits, but from a Benthamite perspective, they could make an honest claim that they were benefiting the welfare of their citizenry. The means may have been oppressive, but the ends were rational and utilitarian. Malthus and Sanger would approve of everything but the skin pigments.

Compare this to modern Western Europe and North America. The “heights” of sexual gratification are wholly separated from the generative act—masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, and the like—and so births fall far below replacement rates. Unsexed demons are granted the civil right to expose themselves next to children, sexually deviant men given the right to undress amongst women, and the devious sodomite is allowed to corrupt every institution and poison every tradition: Sodomites in the Church rape children; sodomites in the County Attorney’s office prosecute the Church—change the institution, repeat.

[Anonymous No.14279226]

>>14279185
The American ruling class is not subject to the worst depredations of this increasing perversion—the proliferation of prostitutes and surrogate parenthood among the lower classes shows how the sexual slavery of the poor will proceed—and yet the ruling class sends its children to schools that teach the same filth. The elder-day Rockefellers forced their sexual oppression on the sons of the poor; the modern-day Rockefellers are content to turn their sons into daughters and their daughters into whores. It is not as if the lower classes were ruled by a Behaviorist ruling class anymore; Sadism runs all the way through.

One cannot understand the modern world without having a theory of suicide. Why are we slowly and intractably killing ourselves—letting our children be mutilated, our women defiled, every institution corrupted? Malcolm Muggeridge called this the “great liberal death wish;” no closed conspiracy of Illuminati or Jew, but an open adoption of self-hatred. The poison of the Enlightenment regimented and etiolated all man’s pleasures of life, from religion to art to childrearing; enslaved him to the state. The materialist is beggared in trying to describe the effects of these changes; the spiritual wounds are captured best in our rising suicide rates; more than this in our television and pornography consumption. Of course, the Enlightenment could not help but ruin sex as well. The unitive component of sex is destroyed by latex—man is so fragile compared to women, who require the complete corruption of their reproductive organs! Sex is no longer perilous. And the one death-defying (le petit morte,), heroic act decent men could perform with regularity has been turned to a rote messiness, closer to a bowel movement than a transcendental act.

This is another contradictory truth Jones cannot grasp: The problem of the modern sexual regime is that people do not enjoy sex enough! The regime imposes great suppression on its subjects; men and women are only allowed to enjoy sex so much. It would actually be an improvement if men were allowed to follow their libidos away from latex; if they were allowed to guide their fat, masculine girlfriends away from the pill. In the West, there is no oppressive regime as in China, no forced sterilizations as in India—but of course, this would require turning those girlfriends into wives… And meanwhile Western women despise the elements of their womanhood not conducive to male pleasure. They shave their pubic hair, mutilate their pudenda, despise the effects of childbirth, and contort their maternal impulses towards serving the state—witness the army of elementary teachers, social workers, youth ministers, medical caretakers: motherhood grafted onto the technostate. If women were to assert the rights they have had since Eve, our regime would break down. Why don’t they?

[Anonymous No.14279233]

>>14279185
Libido Dominandi should be a much better work. My anticipation of it was great; I yearned for a manifesto to stand like a beacon among the ocean of dross and squalor of the modern day. What I got was a poorly written, poorly researched, poorly argued, overpriced, oversized disappointment. Some of the stories are valuable—from the number of footnotes, Reich’s work seems more essential than Jones’s—yet the book as a whole is not worth the effort. E Michael Jones is a crank. There are nuggets hidden in these 600 pages which are useful in combating the modern regime of sexual anarchy, but I wanted a cannon.