reviewed by Brian Peters
Donna Minkowitz gives us that rarest of things: a beautifully written book on disturbing topics that is never a cliché. Mankowitz moves smoothly, and sometimes in disguise, from The Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, to a Sex Panic! convention; from the Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family, to the International SM Fetish Celebration; and from her own painful self-analysis in SM, to Total Woman Ministries. Throughout, she threads the anger, the absurdity, and the ecstacy into the pattern of a personal journey of faith.
Minkowitz, a self-described "radical lesbian" and former writer for the Village Voice, is perhaps best known for her 1995 article in Ms. magazine detailing her successful infiltration of a Promise Keepers rally. In Ferocious Romance she journeys through the fringes of the religious right, finding herself strangely in tune with their anger and their passion, and surprised by the parallels with her SM experiences:
The amazing idealist notion that has won SM so many converts in our time is that difficult things in the "real" world can be redeemed by their simulacra inside the "fake" world of sexuality. (The woman who wears a black hankie in her right pocket to celebrate her own triumph over undesired pain is not too different from the churchgoer who kneels each week before a stylized image of a Roman torture device. By bearing the cross as a symbol, we think we can bear the real crosses in our lives. Something that neither SM people nor Christian rightists ever say is that in reality, violence, torture, and agony cannot be borne, almost by definition. And almost by definition, they cannot be redeemed.)
For Minkowitz, and for most of those she profiles, anger -- and fear of inner demons -- pervades sexual experience. While she finds herself addressing those demons by adopting the ritualized self-control of an SM "top," she finds her Christian right counterparts addressing their demons in the violent, and surprisingly sexual, imagery of ecstatic worship. But neither seems to exorcise the monster:
I became a gay activist to get away from the violative monster within me. But it hasn't worked. Not gay liberation, not feminism, not even sexual liberation can ease that howling monster, or deliver it from me. I can neither soften it nor expel it. I can't quench that fire.
Sex and love are bound up with it, I don't know why; but they make us want to surrender ourselves to the monster, or sacrifice people to it.
Sex Panic! wants us to stop fighting the process. If morality didn't exist, why would unethical conduct trouble us? And if sex is always good, then it can never hurt us.
Moralists fear all of sex, because touching the Other makes them remember the monster. Sex Panic! fears none of sex, so it can pretend that no monster exists.
For as intense as parts of the book are, it still remains charming, witty, and sometimes outright funny, and in a very engaging rhythm. For example, Minkowitz follows her intense self-examination of her SM experience -- a subject where she is almost too close for real perspective -- with ten or so very funny pages describing a Total Woman Ministries service, whose theme appears to be finding Christ through cosmetology.
Happiest of all, there are moments of insight that have a feeling of beauty and calm:
I've been taken to heaven by my friends and even by my lovers, but they took me there without being fully cognizant of it. They did not have the smarmy notion that one person can ever be fully responsible for another's encounter with the holy; they just took me there by being them. I've been taken there, in the same unconscious way, at the Promise Keeper's rally by beautiful strangers, and by the Reverend Fred Phelps, who carries signs that say GOD HATES FAGS and who would rather have died than knowingly bring me someplace nice.
Minkowitz presents a personal journey, and a professional journey, through the adrenaline-soaked experience of the ecstatic convert. For herself she chronicles the triumphant high of the march on Washington, and the frenetic exploration of her SM experiences. As a reporter she examines the whirling dervish of the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, and the instant loving embrace of the Promise Keepers rallies. Not surprisingly, at this level of new commitment, and newly found "answers," these political and sexual polar opposites are united.
Another interesting characteristic unites the ecstatic Christians Minkowitz examines and the SM experiences she until recently embraced; both groups tread close to dangerous lines. SM borders with, and emphatically rejects, the point where the exploration of power becomes abuse. The ecstatic Christians share a path with, and just as carefully reject, the enslavement of a religious cult. And both groups range between smug "you wouldn't understand" answers and frustration in explaining how those dangerous lines have not been crossed.
In the end, Minkowitz finds herself pursuing yet a different course, perhaps a sexual equivalent of "great faith" among the religious. Since I admire the course, but cannot quite share it, I can only dimly explain it. Perhaps it is a path of more sustained joys than ecstatic highs, and certainly it is a journey with more questions than answers. I hope that Minkowitz will someday write about it.
The narrative device of a personal examination of the mysteries of faith -- or "the Other" as Minkowitz says it -- is highly effective, but the book's real strength is not there. In fact, her conclusions on faith seem, perhaps, a bit naïve. What the book does just stunningly well is to examine the communities through which Minkowitz travels, and the surprisingly similar personal struggles of people poles apart politically and sexually. That it does so with such wonderfully crafted prose is all the more to its credit.
