Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier

Eurydice takes as her model the Roman writer Petronius, who claimed that his salacious Satyricon was "simple realism and nothing more." Her vivid tour of America's sexual underside in the mid-1990s--ranging from suburban sadomasochism to male cross-dressing conferences, from lesbian bloodletting rituals to supersize Texas strip clubs--is only slightly less fantastic than the original Satyricon, and would be worth reading solely for anthropological interest (or voyeuristic thrill) even if it were not also exceptionally well written, lively, and acute.

Sadly, perhaps, the author finds most of the contemporary deviant practices she observes to be joyless and vaguely pernicious, "the tricky disguise of our self-denials as sexual excesses." Alert to the reactionary undertow complicating each of these supposed advances, Eurydice is especially suspicious of our rush to define our sexual identities in ever-more-specific terms (butch bottom boy, radical fairy, bigenderist, transbisexual), codifying and policing what ought to be fluid and anarchic. "Words and signs are displacing our genitals," she argues. "Emancipation has brought us no peace." --Regina Marler