Watching these men fight is like watching a live sex show: you project your frustrations and yearnings onto the performers, and hopefully your fantasy is realized — but only vicariously, which is why you keep coming back for more. The pornography of violence is potentially just as profitable as the pornography of sex, and appeals, not surprisingly, to the same demographic. I would have expected the writers to plumb the mindset of these voyeurs of dominance and submission.

Most of us (I desperately hope) perceive violence, especially for its own sake, to be a social evil, but we permit this organized violence, even dignify it with the name of “sport.” We are told mma is increasingly professional and involves great skill. Well, you can professionalize anything, and the art of effective torture also demands exquisite skill. We can’t really call ourselves civilized if we allow this type of spectacle to flourish.

Steven Spencer
Toronto, ON

French Kiss
The mostly Montreal-based, sex-driven narratives discussed in Marianne Ackerman’s “Femmes Fatales” (May) present the nouveau récit of shifting sexual, social, and cultural values. Nelly Arcan is the iconic figure of this movement, with her powerful auto-fictions, Putain and Folle. Anne-Rose Gorroz and Marie-Sissi Labrèche express female sexual-urban angst in more torrid and twisted stories, tales in which S&M is considered alongside architecture and motherhood, or where sex is performed as an exutoire to madness.

These young female authors hold up their lived experience as a narcissistic mirror, but also as a way of depicting the society in which they live. They write about their sexual journeys with authenticity and intensity, two qualities often lacking in similar works by their male counterparts. Perhaps this literary wave, like the popular 1986 Denys Arcand film Le Déclin de l’empire américain, is a provocative answer to Quebec’s latest identity crisis. In this case, it’s white de souche female characters substituting nationalist politics with bedroom politics.

Chantal Maillé
Simone de Beauvoir Institute
Concordia University
Montreal, QC

Name Shame
I was very much looking forward to The Walrus’s coverage of my work (May), even though one never knows how a press interview will be interpreted or contextualized, and there is always a certain degree of anxiety. In this case, I have to say my concern was warranted.