February 11, 2021

Billophilia: Our National Fetish

Poor George W. What's a president got to do to get noticed in this country? The man was almost assassinated last week. But what stories keep rising higher than the river of announcements currently gushing from the White House? What world figure could be so tantalizingly powerful and newsworthy that every major media organization has been orgiastically covering every of his moves? Why, it's our old friend Bill. You know. Our EX president. The guy no longer in the White House. The one with the overpriced New York office and the badly trained publicity dog, Buddy.

Billophilia: it's become a national fetish. Just when we thought we'd heard the last of his blow jobs and breast gropes and assorted sexual transgressions, now the charming face of Mrs. Rich floats before us. No one is saying it but we know what they are implying: she could be another neo-FOB (fuckee of Bill).

Oh horrors! Not another woman Bill fucked or talked into a blow job! My heart can't stand it. Couldn't it at least be something nice and chewy, like an SM tryst? The right-leaning media are falling down on the job, not looking for women Bill might've tied and spanked in his horny life.

The American public isn't half as outraged by the alleged shenanigans as media heads want us to be and clearly our refusal to swallow is getting on their corporate nerves. Lately, they've been trying harder than ever to rewrite our history for us. Sam Donaldson's bizarre pronouncements and unfailingly bad predictions are hardly worth mentioning. But Barbara Walters, talking recently about the current crop of Billophiliac pseudo- scandals, caught me off-guard me when she gurgled that American presidents always leave the White House with dignity. Gravely, she informed us Bill was the first president in memory to leave office beleaguered by scandals and rumors.

My mind whirred. Is it possible that when she had all the face lifts, they also lifted her brain and erased memories of how Jimmy Carter's cabinet was filled with felonious bubbas, or that Ronald Reagan's actual role in Iran-Contra is still open to speculation? I guess Nixon has entirely vanished from her memory banks, along with a certain controversial pardon issued by Gerald Ford which damn near tore the country apart. And JFK: now there was a wholesome president for you. Still, one must admit he left office with dignity, if you consider a funeral a dignified way to go.

Maybe Babs is just blinded by her fetish. We pervs know what that's like. You just gotta have it. You cannot accept substitutes. When you've got a jones for Bill, nothing but Bill will do.

So onward in your fetishes, my fellow Americans! Let us not hesitate to probe Bill's most intimate corners. We still don't know if his penis is bent (according to those allegations of Peyronie's disease that got conservatives so excited, mid- Monica). We know there's cum on the blue dress but we still don't know how much! No one's even checked out his motility rate. I say there's still plenty of fun to be had!

As for our real President, I hope he's paying attention. Sex sells. It's time to don those leather chaps and hit the D.C. Eagle, George--before Bill gets there first.

January 20, 2021

Holocaust Envy

the second in a series on being a child of Survivors and a sadomasochist
Read Part I: Second Generational Sexuality

Part II: Growing Up Dark

Though many of us wish it were otherwise, no one knows why a person grows up to be a sadomasochist. In the absence of fact we have theorists who preach the same old anti-sex message to their choirs. There are feminists who claim SM is about men, religious fanatics who say it's about sin, and therapists who call it a mental disorder and make a buck by trying to cure it.

As a lifelong pervert, and now a sexologist to boot (or, rather, a sexologist in boots), what I know is that honest understanding of SM sexuality does not come from ambiguous data or biased theories, but from qualitative research in the form of stories of individual lives. It's frustrating to rely on personal anecdotes because they are subjective. The more I've studied and explored SM and fetish sexuality, the more I've come to believe we are born this way, much as I believe gay people and transgendered people are born as they are. So I wish we also had solid quantitative data. But since we don't, I've spent my time listening to others and, equally important, reflecting on my own sexual history.

Looking back, I can't point to any one influence that turned me into an SMer. There was no pivotal event, no single moment of enlightenment, no relationship that suddenly opened me up, and certainly no spontaneous sexual conversion. An unbroken line of sexual perversion has run through my life. My fantasies always revolved around power, captivity, torment, and control. As early as three and four, I had fetishes and fantasies in which I was the heroine of cinematic dramas. When I was about eight, I'd motivate myself to practice piano by imagining my class had been kidnapped and that I was forced to entertain our captors. Only my playing could save the lives of my caged and tormented classmates whose screams echoed in the distance. (In retrospect, they may have been screaming about my piano playing.)

Over time, the fantasies grew more vivid and, in puberty, openly sexual. The men--once clad--shed their clothes and gained muscle-mass. As I gained hands-on experience, life-like genitalia sprouted from their formerly sexless bodies, accompanied by hairy chests and stubbled cheeks and other secondary details which separated the fantasy men from the reality boys. Intercourse and oral sex remained minor characters: the stars were control and obedience, suffering and sadism. If a little fucking snuck in, it was a show of power and force, not a tender act.

Then came adolescence and its hormonal frenzies. In the bedroom of my parents' house, I played solitary sadomasochistic games in the dark, creating complex and wildly improbable scenarios. I learned early that where my body can't go, my mind can travel; and my mind sought escape "anywhere out of this world," as Baudelaire once wrote. Night after night, I transported myself to exotic worlds populated by dangerously exciting, incredibly depraved men. Like me, the men of my dreams had unspeakable appetites for degradation and pain. Alone in our African jungle or on our Polynesian island, secreted in a remote mountain cabin or isolated on a vast Montana ranch, we shared taboo-breaking passions, passions too extreme for ordinary mortals.

During periods of stress or loneliness, the fantasies were all-consuming. I secretly edited them as I went about my daily routine, composing dialogue and revising plot elements during school and over dinner. It irked me when my parents interrupted them with idle chatter, so profoundly did they absorb me. I had no name for the fantasies, no inkling they fit any textbook's description of SM. All I knew is that I wanted to be in my dreams, not in my real life. My dreams sustained and consoled me, and gave me incredible psychic relief.

Eventually, I had to live them out. And that, in a very petite nutshell, is my personal history as a sadomasochist. (For more of it, read How A Nice Jewish Girl Like Me Became an Unrepentant Pervert on this site.)

So why would a bright, well-mannered, friendly little girl from Brooklyn secretly delight in fantasies that shock and disgust even sophisticated adults? Answers to such questions could depend on the future of genetic research. Geneticists may one day identify some universal pervy substance or translate some genetic code which signals a personality likely to crave sadomasochistic sex. Until then, we can only guess that it's probably a combination of inborn traits and life experience.

Even if science should one day yield the information that people are born to be SMers, between biology and destiny lie the social and cultural experience of life. DNA can tell us what we have the tendency or potential to be: but who we actually turn out to be is influenced by how and when we grew up, who raised us and how they treated us, and the dynamic forces--church, school, siblings, peers--which shape our lives. So, while I suspect that DNA may do the best job of explaining why I am as I am, the influences in my life share the credit (or blame, depending on your point of view). And since this series of articles is about SM and the Holocaust, I want to look at some of the ways in which I believe my experience as a child of survivors influenced the development of my sexual identity.

Chaos and Control

If you look though my mother's old photo albums, you'll see pictures of an average, happy American family, everyone smiling and rubbing shoulders for the camera. But when I remember my childhood home, and especially when it returns to me in dreams, it is a place of darkness and chaos.

Being a child of Survivors is like having a cemetery in your living room. The ghosts are ever-present. In our home, the ghosts were largely nameless. Though my mother lost seven brothers and sisters, I know the names of only three of them. My father lost eight brothers and sisters--I know the names of only two of his siblings. I have grandparents, aunts and uncles whose faces I've never seen, whose names I don't know, whose bones lie in mass graves. They left behind no photos, no birth certificates, no marriage licenses; they have vanished completely into history.

My parents desperately wanted their children to know about the war and our family history. They repeated some anecdotes hundreds of times. But they could not tell me more than they could tell me; and all they could tell me were the things which caused them the least pain to recollect. So while I may not know much about my ancestors, I know dozens of grimly war humorous stories. For example, while hiding out in Tashkent, my father managed to acquire a fresh egg. The egg was a big deal, as my parents were starving and sick with fever. Excitedly, they debated over how to cook it and finally agreed that my mother would prepare it my father's favorite way: soft-boiled. Unfortunately, as a girl in Warsaw, her older sisters ran the house, and never taught her to cook; as a wife during the Holocaust, she never had food to cook. So she thought that the longer you boil an egg, the softer it gets. Like its parent, the chicken.

My father relished retelling the tale of the leathery egg for forty years. Humor had sustained them during the war and kept us going in Brooklyn. Gallows humor is, in fact, endemic among Survivors and their children: our best coping mechanism.

But beneath the levity, and like many other Survivors, my parents were chronically depressed and mentally unstable. They had survived catastrophe, but not intact. So much for Nietszche's "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Most things which almost kill you are much more likely to cripple than to strengthen you. Forever after their traumas, my parents were unpredictable, fearful, paranoid, and irrational. The petty business of life was unfathomably stressful for them. Small chores were vast endeavors. Basic competence was a struggle. Decisions were made, unmade, remade, postponed, then abandoned at the last minute. Encounters with the world beyond our front door were fraught with tension. Calling a utility company to correct a bill was an ordeal that could preoccupy them for days on end. Hiring a plumber or roofer sent them into emotional tailspins.

Shortly after putting the family house up for sale last year, my mother called in a panic. "People are coming here! Strangers!"

"Wasn't that the point of advertising? Would you prefer if no one showed up?" I asked, bemused.

"You don't understand!" she began to sob, "They come in and they stare at everything! The look into closets! They touch everything. They go into every room!"

"But, Mom...what else would you expect buyers to do?"

"You don't know what I'm going through!" she hissed, infuriated. "They're stealing things!"

Of course, this wasn't true. Nothing went missing from her house. But on a metaphysical level I suppose each intrusion was a theft, and each stranger a potential looter, or thug, a Nazi. My parents--who were raised in what later became known as the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the war years in Russia--lived in Brooklyn as they lived in Europe. Metaphysically, their house was a fortress against the enemies of the Jews, who were numerous. Beyond our walls, there was chaos and cruelty. Inside them was a constant vigil. The past was the Holocaust; the present a period of temporary safety; the future could be another Holocaust. They took every precaution. They didn't stand out in a crowd. They didn't ask for too much. They lived small and sat quietly, because around every corner lurked a gentile, ready to lop off the earlocks of a Jewish boy or to rape a Jewish girl. They expected their children to live this way and to share their fears. Because I didn't, I was marked as an outsider from the very start.

Despite their distinctly Jewish fear of gentiles, my parents were atheists. As far as they were concerned, God was a bust: if God existed, He would never have allowed the Holocaust to happen. So God was another casualty of the war. But they didn't have much experience at atheism, either. Their interpretation of life boiled down to a mistrust of life. There were no guarantees the sun would rise the next day, no promises of an afterlife, no greater purpose to existence, much less the universe, than existence itself; and that existence was fragile, evanescent, flawed by the inevitability of death.

The lesson of my childhood was that no one was in charge and that reality was ever-shifting. I instinctively knew that if I didn't create order from this chaos, I'd never survive. That's probably why one of my favorite playthings was a big box of buttons my father brought home from work. I'd sort buttons for hours, inventing categories for them and re-arranging them obsessively, according to size, shape, design, color, material. Favorite buttons were lined up and praised; inferiors were banished to a miscellaneous pile and ignored.

And so my need to control things and create my own reality was cemented young. To this day, I must be surrounded by things I can shape and control-- a submissive, a garden, a dog, a book. I need to make things--a poem, a website, a collage. I'm fulfilled when people depend on me and trust my judgment. Depending on others remains problematic; trust comes slowly and giving up control remains almost impossible. Dominance and discipline and, above all, a need for order, are essential elements of my personality. I am still fighting the chaos.

Invasiveness and Neglect

As a factory laborer, my father worked incredibly long hours. I usually only saw him on weekends. My mother stayed home with the kids, yet somehow was never wholly present. She spent long hours composing letters to distant friends, all Survivors, who functioned as my parents' surrogate family after the war.

At times, her anomie amounted to neglect. The summer I turned three, we vacationed at a Catskill bungalow colony. More than once that summer, I went missing. My mother would start gossiping or playing Bingo, and forget about me for hours at a time. Eventually, she would look around and realize I was gone. She'd go on a panicky rampage through the colony until she found me in some unlikely spot, and then would spend the next few hours screaming at me for being irresponsible.

It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about a parent losing track of her three year old for hours at a time, or being angry at a toddler for acting like a toddler. I always felt there was something shameful about being a child. I felt responsible for everything, even for maintaining peace in a household where everyone else--parents and sister--quarreled every day. When bad things happened to me (as they occasionally did), I blamed myself for not being bigger, older, stronger, smarter.

In adolescence, I began to exploit my mother's maternal lapses. By age twelve, I led an active secret life. By thirteen, I was cutting school and smoking pot. At fourteen, I was having sex and hitch-hiking. At fifteen, I managed to get away for week-long sex and drug adventures. It didn't take much ingenuity: I'd give her the fake phone number of a non-existent aunt of a classmate I was allegedly visiting, then ask her not to call. She wouldn't call. Simple.

The only thing worse than her apathy were her sudden fits of overcompensation. Without warning, she went into maternal overdrive and became relentlessly, maddeningly, degradingly invasive. She hated my hairstyle. She hated my clothes. She disliked my girlfriends. She disapproved of my boyfriends. She despaired of my personal habits. She objected that I watched tv too late. She didn't like what I watched on tv. In fact, she didn't think I should watch tv. I should read. But I shouldn't read the book I was reading; I was too good for that book. I should read the book she was reading. "Are you crazy?" she'd shriek. "Are you stupid?"

One memorable incident happened when I was about fourteen. While I was at music school, my mother suddenly decided to search my room. It probably took her all of about five seconds to find my pornography stash--a sad little assortment of SCREW magazines. It's humorous now to think back on my mother's howling horror upon beholding Al Goldstein's hilariously sordid handiwork. It wasn't quite so humorous at the time. However, it didn't last long either. After the hysteria died down, they just couldn't bear to raise the subject again, even though they undoubtedly believed I was well on the road to sexual perdition.

I can see connections between this yo-yo-ing between invasion and neglect and my adult sexuality. Full-bore psychological invasion turns me on. I'll take a mind fuck to a body fuck any day of the week. I like to get deep inside someone's brain: to manipulate and taunt him with his worst fears, to terrorize him until he whimpers, to intimidate him until he cringes and trembles. I like to ignore him and treat him coldly, grow remote or pull away without explanation and let him endlessly stew. Mental cruelty is perhaps my favorite type of cruelty.

Poor Pitiful Men

Some years ago, in the midst of a doomed, heart-shriveling affair, I joked to Will: "I think I'm in love: I've finally met a man just as fucked up as my father." It wasn't exactly the first time I'd noticed my irresistible urge to merge with psychotics. An impressive collection of really fucked-up men have spiked my life. That I married someone as steady, strong and sane as Will is amazing: he must have caught me at an off- moment.

Actually, for the most part, my father was funny, gentle, and kind, though he had a sadistic side which occasionally surfaced. When I was very young, he would initiate this game where he grabbed my fingers with his hand and squeezed them until I howled in pain. I never understood the point of this game, and I didn't enjoy the pain, but I always went along because I knew it was a special game that he played with me and me alone.

The war damaged my father; my mother's spiteful, ruthless bullying finished him. He would wink and call her "little Napoleon," but it was no joke. She ran his life: she dictated what he wore, what he ate, how money was spent, where they vacationed, who whom they socialized. She wouldn't let him have his own friends, she supervised his phonecalls, and she sneered at his sole surviving brother, ensuring an uneasy, emotionally distant relationship between the two men. My father fought against her tyranny for years. But he never even had the satisfaction of a pyrrhic victory: she always won hands-down. Eventually, he fought less and retreated more. It was only towards the end of his life, when he was too ill to contain his emotions, that fifty years of pent-up anger and frustration exploded with near-nuclear force.

One conversation I had with him haunts me. My mother had pressured him to retire early so she wouldn't have to be alone so much of the time. At 63 my father--incredibly vigorous and vibrant--found himself with nothing to do, except my mother's bidding. We took a long walk one night and he confided worriedly that he was afraid that staying home with my mother full-time would drive him crazy. I laughed, but he said he was serious: he was afraid she would push him over the edge of sanity. I was in my 20s and callous: I shrugged off his comments; I'd heard hundreds of similar complaints from him. But I think now his words were prophetic. He died insane. The doctors never could determine if his dementia was initially caused by physiological or psychiatric problems.

Still, if happiness in a marriage is measured by devotion, then my parents' marriage was a model of bliss. "For better or worse" might as well have been etched in stone. All the fights and threats and anger amounted to nothing more than the noise that frightened animals make in the night. My father wouldn't have known who he was without my mother by his side. My mother's entire identity depended on being my father's wife.

It wasn't your regular, run-of-the-mill codependency. Something else was going on, and that something else was the Holocaust. They were bound together for life. My parents were teenagers when the war broke out: though they knew and liked each other, they'd never dated. Then through a series of circumstances so improbable that only a Harlequin romance reader would buy it, they met up again in Russia, about a year into the war, and fell madly in love. They spent the rest of the war together: running together, hiding together, starving together, losing a baby together, and nearly dying together time and time again. They grew up together during the war and then they immigrated to the U.S. together and grew old together.

There's no doubt in my mind that these family dynamics influenced my attitude towards men in general. I always saw women as stronger and more competent. I never expected men to be "men." Seeing them cry didn't lower them in my eyes. I never expected them to have all the answers. I had no difficulty challenging male teachers. I loved watching shows like "Father Knows Best" but I had no illusions that such serenely wise ur- Daddies really existed. I perceived males as moody, sensitive, often unreliable and always unpredictable. The idea of a man being capable of taking care of me was unthinkable.

As a girl, I wanted to rescue my father from his misery. As a woman, I found myself repeatedly drawn to needy vanilla men, "lost boy" types, believing I could save them from unhappiness. I was no more successful rescuing vanilla men than rescuing my father. They didn't need strong women; they needed personal courage. A woman can give a man many things but she can't give him balls.

The first and sweetest revelation about SM was discovering a world of men who longed to serve and obey, not out of cowardice and negativity, but because it brought them pleasure and joy. SM solved a moral problem for me: I had to be the strong figure in the relationship, but I didn't want to do it at the expense of another person's happiness. Nor did I want to spend my time changing grown mens' figurative diapers. (Real diapers are a whole 'nother thing, of course.)

As I see it, clear-headed submissive men possess tremendous personal courage. Perhaps that is why I've finally allowed myself to accept care-taking from men--submissive men, that is. Granted, it's probably because submissives take care of me according to my orders but at least it's a start!

Evil

You cannot grow up as a child of people who were the targets of genocide without knowing, from your first moment of consciousness, that there is evil in the world.

You know that men commit murder and rape and infanticide. You know that people are capable of skinning other people and turning them into lamp-shades. You know they can treat their fellows like cattle and shove them into mass graves without losing a wink of sleep.

Even if your parents don't give you all the grisly details, you spend hours in libraries reading books with pictures too horrible to fathom. You look at each one closely, wondering if your grandparents are in it, even though you know you wouldn't recognize them even if they were. At parties, you huddle in a back room with other Survivors' children and exchange your parents' war stories. You go through phases when you feebly attempt to look for missing relatives; phases when you pump your parents for details; phases when you try to block out all consciousness that there ever was a Holocaust; phases when you grieve bitterly for your unknown families; and times when you feel you don't deserve to be alive. When your parents' ghosts are all treated as heroes and saints, you feel like nothing at all. You can never live up to the memory of the dead, with whom you are constantly compared.

When you grow up as a child of Holocaust Survivors, evil is both your enemy and familiar. You know all about it, inside and out. You may choose to deny its proximity, but that doesn't make it go away. One of the lessons of the Holocaust was that if you close your eyes to evil, it only gets bigger.

It doesn't surprise me that Nazi leaders were good family man any more than it surprises me when good family men turn out to be abusive brutes. Though the subject is seldom discussed, some boys I knew had been punished Nazi-style by their outwardly respectable fathers. These men violently beat and kicked their children boys while shouting curses in German--the same curses prison guards had once used when beating them.

Another thing that many of us know but few will ever openly discuss is that within the close-knit Survivor communities are unknown numbers of Jews who colluded with and worked for the Nazis. One spunky old fellow I knew had been a capo--a kind of Jewish deputy charged with deciding which prisoners were sent to the gas chambers; another man had been a male whore for gay Nazi officers; one sweet-faced elderly lady performed similar sexual services for a commandant; many more cleaned out the crematoria or worked as domestic servants. I didn't hear it from the old people but from their children, who struggled all their lives with the knowledge of what their parents had done to stay alive.

Frankly, on the whole, Jewish Survivors aren't very nice. They may be great parents and friends, and many were unbelievably kind to youngsters. Still, very nice people don't usually survive the conditions they endured during the war. They all had to be willing to steal food, sometimes from their own friends; they all had to make enormous moral compromises, unfathomable compromises that only someone facing life and death decisions can understand. Can you imagine what kind of toughness and callousness and selfishness it must require to survive in a place where humans are literally treated like rats?

Evil is not something that only evil people commit. There are many different kinds of evil. We do evil when we fail to speak out against injustice. We do evil when we fail to honor our commitments, or lie or cheat or steal or harm others or harm ourselves. There are hundreds of types and degrees of evil: and they are living parts of us, just as hundreds of types and degrees of goodness are living parts of us (and, hopefully, the stronger parts).

As a child of Survivors I am simply not afraid of many things that other people call "evil." To me, consensual adult sex--no matter how bizarre--just doesn't qualify as evil. If pleasurable sex is evil, then what word should we use to describe Nazism? Super-duper-evil?

Playing with evil--acting out the cruel aspects of my personality, freely expressing aggression, channeling violent impulses, and basically letting my sadism hang out: that's thrilling; liberating. SM is my sexual orientation. Acting on it is being true to myself. I don't call that evil. I call it good.

Roadmaps to Perversion

It's taken me far longer to write this than I could ever have imagined. Partly it's because Will and I had to deal with an astonishing array of emergencies, big and small, these last few months. But the real reason this essay has been so slow in coming is because old memories and old dreams have become so vivid to me that it's difficult knowing where to begin. All of them illustrate attitudes that fit with an SM personality.

Even as a child, I observed that there was a kind of hierarchy of pain among Survivors. The people who'd suffered the most, the ones who'd been in the death camps, the ones who'd been on Mengele's blocks--they were a kind of elite class, people who instantly elicited a kind of worshipful respect. My parents, who escaped Nazi rule by fleeing to barely-populated regions of Russia, were low on that hierarchy. Their starvation couldn't compete with a tattoo from Auschwitz. Whoever suffered the most was nobler: the idea held a powerful romantic fascination for me.

I remember once sitting at a dinner table with a group of elderly women, all of whom had been in concentration camps. One lady discussed the ghoulish crime that had just occurred in the basement rental of the two-family house she owned. She'd gone downstairs to do the laundry and noticed blood seeping from under the apartment door. She got the key and went inside: her tenant had been brutally slaughtered, his mutilated corpse stuffed into the sofa-bed, blood splattered on carpets, walls, and ceilings. Only a few days before this discovery, she had fallen down her front stairs and broken her wrist. A month before that, her daughter's fiance had died in a freak accident that was rumored to have been suicide. As she recounted her many travails, her friends clucked about how difficult it must have been to wash away the blood with her broken wrist.

"Yes, it took so long to clean up all that blood!" she confessed with a sigh. "It's been one terrible thing after another." She paused, then suddenly smiled and declared, "It's like being in the camps again!"

The old women giggled. Their reaction took me aback, yet I understood immediately. Life was too terrible, too tortured, too tragic. If they didn't laugh, they wouldn't survive.

My former slave often commented on how much I laugh and smile when I beat him. I've always attributed it to the high I get from SM, the delight I take in depravity, and the immense psychic relief that comes of venting my sexual sadism. But growing up in an environment where we roared at morbid jokes, perhaps I'm more inclined to grin when someone screams in pain than the average dom.

Dozens of poignant anecdotes have returned to me as I've worked on this piece, revealing a multitude of influences that probably shaded my sadomasochistic imagination. Still, something was there that made me assimilate these influences as I did. My sister is as straight as it gets. I know Survivors' children who came from far more volatile homes, yet who have conventional prejudices again SM sex. More than that, I'm sure there are more than a few who are horrified by SM precisely because some SM scenarios involve emotions and power dynamics that remind them not only of their parents' destructive behaviors in their own homes but of the entire Nazi experience.

So my conclusion is simple: I was born to be an SMer. Everything that occurred in my environment was filtered through an innate sadomasochistic sensibility. Had I been born to Christians, no doubt I would've been the child who left Bible school obsessed with images of Christ on the cross and deeply fascinated by sin. Had I been born to African-Americans, the constant assaults on my dignity and the power struggles of my people no doubt would have shaped my sadomasochistic identity; the history of American slavery would have cast its dark shadow upon that house just as the Holocaust cast its shadow on my parents' house.

The third and final essay in this series will bring me to the eponymous topic that originally inspired this writing project. "Holocaust Envy" will take a look at the strange phenomenon of dilettantes who become personally obsessed with the Holocaust and then turn it into a political platform-- particularly Dr. Laura Schlessinger and some feminist rhetoricians. It will also include my thoughts on the Nazi-fetish Scene.

special thanks to Will Brame and his slave, jen, for their help and support

If you'd like to comment on this essay,
drop me a line at ggbrame@aol.com.