Sade’s sexual orgies prefigure and mirror the regimentation of modern sport

Evidence

Although totalitarian or authoritarian regimes may all try to ban psychoanalysis and declare that personal emotional conflicts have no place for citizens loyally integrated into the community, eroticism is an experience where individuality always prevails over generality. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.” Still, sports and military metaphors could function in similar ways, critics pointed out. In a world destabilized by modern feminism, sports offered disaffected men a masculine haven. Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated. Both sports and the military, too, reinforced a dualistic view of the world. In athletics, as in battle, there were winners and losers. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 358 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Sport itself is not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection. They parody freedom in their readiness for service, a service which the individual forcibly exacts from his own body for a second time. In the freedom which he exercises over his body the individual confirms what he is by inflicting upon this slave the same injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society. The passion for sport, in which the masters of mass culture sense the real mass basis of their dictatorial power, is grounded in this fact. One can play the master by inflicting the original pain upon oneself and others again symbolically through a kind of compulsive repetition. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sports metaphors preserved military-style masculine dominance in sanitized form — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 358; Sport ritually re-enacts subjection that society has already inflicted — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 133; Sport converts submission to authority into voluntary self-imposed ritual discipline — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 129 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Eroticism resists integration into any social or state community #contradicts (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147
• Sports metaphors preserved military-style masculine dominance in sanitized form #complicates (0.75) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 358
• Sport converts submission to authority into voluntary self-imposed ritual discipline #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129
• Sport ritually re-enacts subjection that society has already inflicted #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 133