Let's try an exercise. Let's substitute another person for woman or Satine in sentences from this article and see what happens.

A Jewish woman is duct-taped to a rectangular wooden beam. A gas mask is placed over her head....an electric acrylic plug is slid into her vagina.

Between setups a black woman puts on a blue robe that has "slave" embroidered on its chest.

Mr. Elliott’s lousy sentence construction aside, so long as the subject is a woman, the language of derision is acceptable. Saying derision is OK because women want to be injured sounds so much like what abused women say in domestic violence situations that I cannot help but doubt it's veracity. There is a psychological state where people believe they're making choices when, in fact, they've co-opted the opinions of those manipulating them.

Porn is profitable...for the men in charge. Sure, the women make good money for the few short years of their usefulness …and then? Oh yes, they write novels, start farms, teach tantra. Tantra?!

Mr. Elliott is certainly gullible if not completely credulous. Why is the opinion of a man cringing while he's watching women hurt each other for his pleasure considered a reliable recorder of what's happening? A man who chose to go with his fantasy even in the face of literally painful reality, is no more a trustworthy narrator than Humbert Humbert.

Let's stop using lying about what's going on and stop using euphemisms. Satine is not a model, she is a porn actor with psychological problems. Maybe she's recovering from alcholism and just trying to pay bills, but I suspect that's another of Mr. Elliott's fantasies, like the one where he's a well-adjusted porn star.

S&M is not just another form of sex, it is a form of power using sex as a method of control. The thrill comes from the power play, not the foreplay. Confusing pain and pleasure is not healthy.

There's no way to argue that intentionally injuring yourself or someone else is OK without believing that compartmentalizing experience is possible or desirable. Positing that separating physical experience from psychological states is not damaging defies fundamental psychological principles. Post-traumatic stress anyone?

I don't care what people do in their private lives, but trying to pass it off as just another pastime is bogus. Interference from the government smacks of personal restraint and oppression. Ironically, just the thing that gets these people off.

One loathes to use Sendak's trick of staring into all her yellow eyes before telling her to be still. However, those who hired and admire Ms. Paglia and she, herself, might benefit from a good look into her own contradictory and shallow work.

She sees Christianity as a mythology without conflict, western civilization as a series of neurosis, says feminism (it is unclear whether she mean feminists or feminism as an intellectual perspective) is "incapable of appreciating art," and has posited that beauty and art are simple opposite end perversions of maleness. "Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Salon prizes itself on well written investigative journalism and essays made up of astute observations and critical thought. The loud, trite and thoughtless Ms. Paglia fits into this design the same way Barry Bonds fits into an ethics class, as an example of what not to do. I also suspect they share a characteristic enlarged head.

Those who think riling people up is creative mistake vitriol for virtue. I use the great and much missed Molly Ivins to counter any claim Ms. Paglia has to being either an intellectual or a feminist.

"Tracing Paglia's intellectual ancestry is a telling exercise; she's the lineal descendant of Ayn Rand, who in turn was a student of William Graham Sumner, one of the early American sociologists and an enormously successful popularzier of social Darwinism. Sumner was in turn a disciple of Herbert Spencer, that splendid nineteenth-century kook. Because Paglia reasserts ideas so ingrained in our thinking, she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices....

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in...intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation's intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has ``flashes of brilliance.'' If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill."

The link to the Ivans essay follows. The last line sums up the intellectual worth of Ms. Paglia's work. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia