Review of Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones

This book has much to offer, but with a careful eye

"A man," Augustine had written, "has as many masters as he has vices." This is a tagline for Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, and he keeps returning to this theme throughout this massive work.

This book has something to offer, but with a careful eye. Jones tackles an enormous topic and comes out mostly sideways. He's neither a good scholar nor a good writer. Still, the text is readable and enjoyable, if not a bit like racing through a museum with a curator who's calling your attention to all the things plastered all over the walls and ceilings. But it's what kept me reading to the end.

Jones is part historian, part biographer. He's wide ranging in his approach because he loops in any event or any person he believes to be connected to his current discussion. He unearths minutia that doesn't seem to readily fit the context of his larger issue. He can literally jump back and forth 200 hundred years within a sentence or two. What I'm saying is that reading the book can be a bit dizzying. Sure, each chapter is headed with a city and sequential date, but that often doesn't matter. For example, Part II Chapter 7 is titled "Baltimore, 1916," and the chapter begins: "In the 1930 edition of his famous book..." Wut? You just told me were in 1916. And by the end of each chapter you're sometimes years or even *decades* ahead of where you started. It can be a bit confusing until you get used to it.

Then there's the name dropping, or I should say: lack of tight scholarship. Jones quite often assumes you know who or what he's talking about when he mentions a new name or term or event. I found myself many times re-reading paragraphs above the text where I was in order to see where this name appeared before. But that's just how he writes. He'll often quote other writers writing about events or other people and simply write something like this: "Hitler, according to Igra, was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna." (p. 198) Hitler was gay? Wut? Huh? Imagine your shock if you've never read anything about this in any other book. And who is Igra? Check the notes. Nothing. Check the bibliography. Nothing. Check the index. One instance. On page 198. Google his name. Samuel Igra is the author of a book titled Germany's National Vice. Okay. So this happens a lot. Jones drops names and events without any context. (He's not as bad of a writer as, say, Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, though, which I couldn't get through.) Other books and authors are mentioned in passing, not fully explained, and then left behind. (One of note is The Clam-Pate Orgy; google it; I'm old enough to remember when this book came out. Another is the Moynihan Report of the 1960s. Again, if I had not known of both of these before reading Jones' book, I would have been left staring at the page wondering what and why they were in his book.) And some names you'd think he'd use are never mentioned or lightly passed over (The Frankfurt School, Jews and Hollywood, Operation Mockingbird, Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem being CIA assets, among others).

Jones drops a variety of Latin phrases left and right, too, ad nauseam (heh); have your laptop or mobile handy as you read to provide translations. Several times he provides a title of a movie or pamphlet or book in the original language (for example, French or German), without an English translation. Not helpful. I had to search many terms and after a while simply gave up. One was the German word Kulturbolschewismus (Cultural Bolshevism). Now, if you don't know this term you will miss a lot of the deeper meaning of Jones' text. So be prepared to do a bit of your own digging as you're reading the book.

In many cases Jones assumes much from his reader, too. He doesn't go into much detail at all about the decadence and excesses of Germany's Weimar Republic. (And "decadence" and "excess" don't really do the period justice. Look this stuff up for yourself.)

He needed a good editor, desperately. Typographical and grammatical errors abound.

I can't recall Jones using any passages from the Bible to support his thesis, which is a real shame, because it would have illuminated one of the many axes he's grinding here, which is: some people enjoy the evil they do. "The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light" (John 3:19). It's even more of a shame when he gets so entangled in his Catholicism that he's blinded to the basic tenets of Christianity. His misreading of the concept of the priesthood of all believers is particularly troubling (p. 499). I was also disappointed in what Jones *didn't* discuss: real pornography and its affect on the human mind. He literally skips over the 1950s founding of Playboy and the 1960s, too, and dabbles in it when he gets to the Meese Commission on Pornography.

But there is good stuff. Much of it.

You'll read about such disparate men and events as Augustine, Plato, the Marquis de Sade, the French Revolution, the Illuminati, Nietzsche, Freud, Jews, Christianity, the Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the Armory Show, Margaret Sanger and the early eugenicists, Kulaks, Bernays (father of modern advertising), Madison Avenue, race relations, white flight, contraception, Planned Parenthood, Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, Kinsey (his open marriage, his bisexuality, his self harm issues--an attempt to circumcise himself and his urethral sounding fetish; liberation is fine, but yikes!), Norman Mailer and his essay "The White Negro", Skull and Bones, Aleister Crowley, encounter groups, MK Ultra (the list is nearly endless), and Jones wends and winds and ties them all together. Sometimes not so neatly. But it's always interesting, and he drops gems throughout. Such as:

"Liberalism, by the inner dynamic of its logic, was forced to become an instrument of social control in order to avoid the chaos which it created by its own erosion of tradition and morals. Democratic man could not be left to his own devices; chaos would result. The logic is clear. If there is no God, there can be no religion; if there was no religion, there can be no morals; if there are no morals, there can be no self-control; if there is no self-control, there can be no social order; if there is no social order, there can be nothing but the chaos of competing desire." (p. 187)

"It [feminism] entailed the systematic re-engineering of the morals of women as a way of moving them out of the home and into the workforce, thereby lowering wages and weakening the power of organized labor and the working-class family." (p. 255)

"The state can tolerate only those mores compatible with its system of values... The classical state must foster virtue; the revolutionary state must foster vice." (p. 260-1)

"Those who look at the Betty Page photos fifty years later wonder what the big deal was all about without realizing that the big deal lies in the very fact that the viewer can no longer feel the passion the photos were intended to incite. Pornography is something based on transgression, and the boundaries of 1950 have been so often and so thoroughly transgressed, that no one can see that they were once boundaries." (p. 367)

Written 20 years ago, Jones seems prescient across the culture to what we see today: child drag queen shows (10-year-old drag kid Desmond is Amazing on Good Morning America), Drag Queen Story Hour at your local library, children under 10 transitioning genders and having gender reassignment surgery, suburban moms skyrocketing 50 Shades of Gray to national bestseller lists, off-the-charts STD rates, Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy websites, NEXIUM sex cult, Epstein Island horror show (dentist chair, baby toys; google actively censors this, so use duck duck go), young women being more promiscuous than men (General Social Survey), children's creepy clothing lines Caroline Bosmans, the UK trying to ban porn for under 18s, cannibalism in our TV shows and movies, and on and on.

How did we get here? A wise man told us 2,000 years ago: A little leaven leavens the whole bunch.

I liked it
3/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon

PS: If Libido Dominandi is your type of book, other readings and viewings you might enjoy (and which will help your reading and understanding of it) include Staring into Chaos (nonfiction history), The Kulaks Must be Liquidated as a Class (article, National Review), Bob Fosse's Cabaret (article, The Unz Review), and Century of the Self (documentary).