Trying to communicate to minds that are completely blank and resistant is a fantastic exercise. This is where Sexual Personae was most prophetic. In one of Michelangelo's statues the pin holding up a breastplate bites into the flesh. When I wrote that line, no one would have known what I was talking about. By the time the book came out in 1990, piercing was a fashion statement.
Sadomasochism is a primary principle of nature.
It's Darwinian-sex and aggression. These are the elemental forces of nature that the West or any civilized culture conceals from itself. Middle class people are removed from the operations of nature in a way their ancestors who worked on farms were not. There's something, it seems to me, ill about this fantastic complex machinery, the modern world. But the context is missing.