It struck us as grimly appropriate that the reading list for Wesleyan’s course on pornography should include Susan Sontag along with the Marquis de Sade and Hustler. The aging doyenne of radical chic seems to show up at every party where the protagonists “push people over the line, whatever their line is.” It was not all that long ago that Miss Sontag was denouncing America as an evil imperialistic state that, “founded on a genocide” itself, seemed bent on exporting murder and mayhem to other parts of the globe. Not that Miss Sontag reserved her animus solely for Americans; white Europeans in general qualified for unbridled contempt. As she put it in one of her more memorable formulations, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”

As far as we know, Miss Sontag never retracted that statement (though she later suggested that it might be unfair—to cancer). Yet the imperatives of seeming alwa ...

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