Like other renegade subcultures, S/M is gradually becoming gentrified. This is partly economic — getting flogged on a Friday night isn’t as cheap as it used to be. Dozens of exclusive sex stores have popped up, peddling high-end toys, devices and leatherware. A typical private “play party” runs each guest as much as $30 (this is a site cost — you pay for the space, not the sex). Certain clubs even enforce a pricey dress code: If you aren’t all gussied up in latex or leather, you don’t get in the door.

This isn’t the kind of gentrification one sees in urban landscapes where yuppies suck up all the warehouse spaces and formerly low-income housing. Nor can one locate some previous version of the S/M community that was less wealthy. Indeed, tracing S/M’s origins back to its Founding Daddies — the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch — one finds that S/M’s earliest class connections are purely aristocratic.

Over the past few decades, however, S/M practices have unmoored themselves from the fringe. As specialty leather and fetters shops like San Francisco’s Mr. S demonstrate, S/M is making its way into the mainstream. With its tidy, gleaming racks of sweet-smelling leather goods, Mr. S can only be described as boutique for sado-masochists — people who eroticize pain, power games and bondage. “I wanted to go high-end with better quality goods,” says Richard Hunter, who owns the store along with his son. “It’s not just the hardcore leather crowd anymore. A lot of them are very middle-class and live in the suburbs. They’ve read about it or seen us on HBO.” (The cable channel featured the shop on its cheerfully bawdy “Real Sex” series.)

This this upwardly-mobile trend in S/M can be prohibitive for people without a middle-class income — ironic, given that many of the community’s most outspoken advocates, such as well-known erotica author and therapist Pat Califia, have come from working class backgrounds. But even if a fancy corset runs upwards of $200, there are still plenty of active S/M players whose income levels barely crack five digits. Why, then, do the most visible elements of the S/M community seem to associate edgy sex play with terms like “high quality,” “classy” or even that most Puritanical of adjectives, “clean”?

To understand S/M in the year 2000, we have to look at the late ’60s, when the Sexual Revolution had baby boomers struggling to break from bourgeois sexual repression, hypocrisy and self-denial. Of course 1960s countercultural rebellion wasn’t so different from the 1760s’ rebelliousness of aristocrat-sadists like de Sade, who also loathed bourgeois prudery, hypocrisy and rationalism. Enlightenment-era libertines and boomer counterculturalists alike tried to challenge their bourgeois counterparts with sexual hedonism and social experimentation that flew in the face of rigid, middle-class values.

S/M originated as a kind of social theory. Growing out of anti-bourgeois and anti-rationalist sentiment in the 18th and 19th centuries, and anti-establishment politics in the 1960s, S/M theory revolves around the struggle to define power and consent. As S/M player “Ms. J” puts it (she chose not to be identified by her given name), “People who practice S/M learn to play with power, and become free in that play and expression. It is very threatening to the state for the populace to become so at ease — as they are less malleable and not easily subjugated anymore, in a certain sense.”

Games in which power is exchanged, granted and, most importantly, controlled, can teach players how power works and what it means to defy it. As experienced players often report, S/M games are as much about trusting your partner(s) to take or relinquish power as they are about shiny boots and luscious whips.

It’s for this reason that theories of consent are at the very core of S/M thought. Playing safely with power requires a sophisticated understanding of what it means to say yes and no in an informed manner. Dozens of S/M manuals, classes and rituals are devoted to consent. And just how do we know when we’ve obtained it? How can somebody in restraints, ass caned to a bloody pulp, indicate the difference between a happy scream and an I’m-ready-to-stop scream?

It’s from S/M theory that we’ve developed the concept of “safe words:” established phrases that signal the end of a scene (many people use the easy-to-remember “yellow” to request a slow down, and “red” for stop). More importantly, S/M theory has inaugurated a whole new way of engaging in sexual communication. In the S/M community, communication is at the root of all sexual satisfaction — you can’t get consent to shock someone’s cock with an electric wand without a fairly detailed discussion beforehand about how you plan to do it.

Many players today consider their sexual adventures to be in the anti-authoritarian tradition of S/M theory. Artesia, an S/M player in the San Francisco area, believes that S/M is becoming more mainstream as 1960s hedonists settle down. She sees gentrified S/M in the context of “the greying of the baby boomers, who have always embraced their sexuality and are educated enough to advocate their explorations.”

Like hippies who grew up to found “socially responsible” corporations, many S/M players have moved from life on the fringe to having their own social institutions — albeit ones founded on fairly radical post-’60s principles. One of the nation’s oldest S/M organizations, The Society of Janus (SOJ), was founded in 1971, around the time the counterculture was beginning to feed into what today’s pundits would call sexual politics. Devoted to “education and support,” SOJ operates somewhat like the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the ’70s. One attends SOJ meetings to share experiences in a relaxed environment, and, as the membership brochure states, to learn more about “sexuality based upon a safe, consensual, non-exploitative transfer of power between partners.” This language is deeply influenced by 1970s feminist ideals of safety and nonexploitation in personal relationships.

During the Reagan Era, S/M became a new form of safe sex — especially in the queer community. Hunter, from Mr. S, speculates that many gay men came to appreciate S/M after AIDS put limits on queer sexual experimentation. “Because of AIDS, many people were trying to find alternatives that would intensify sexuality and that would allow them to play in a way that wasn’t dangerous. I think that opened things up. They thought, Hey, I’ll just tie him up.’ Rather than stop having sex, they tried something else.”

Nineties S/M, with its highly fetishized latex outerwear and safe sex-positivity, was clearly a reaction against the AIDS-wracked, anti-sex ’80s, when bathhouses were shut down and police raided sex clubs. As Cleis Press owner Felice Newman puts it, “The sex wars are over, and we won.” The kinky and pro-sex communities were no longer threatened by anti-sexperts like Andrea Dworkin. A movement to re-open the bath houses took San Francisco by storm, and unsafe sex clubs became a controversial new subculture. Even people who didn’t consider themselves S/M-ers began reading Anne Rice’s erotica about anal torture, caning and bondage.

As a result, what constitutes contemporary S/M is a weird combination of bourgeois ideals — safety, education, taste — and what could be called the original ideals of S/M — radical transgression, a hedonistic anti-work ethic, absolute sexual freedom and a strong distaste for political authority. One finds seemingly incompatible belief systems mingling to create Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt’s kinky bible, “The Ethical Slut,” and organizations such as Quality S/M (QSM), an elegant and efficiently run mail-order erotica bookstore and S/M education facility where one is invited to purchase “classy” fetish stories about topics such as coporophilia and enslaving oneself.

Odder still to an outsider would be the experience of attending an S/M seminar at QSM’s San Francisco warehouse, where a room full of well-dressed people in orderly rows of folding chairs watch politely as a well-known “dominant” demonstrates how to torture nipples correctly and why it’s important to employ bondage devices that won’t cause nerve damage. To avoid appearing “unsafe,” players plan their taboo violations and transgressions to a ‘T.’ It can be too much — Joe, a member of the coordinating committee for the Third Annual Leather Leadership Conference, notes ruefully that “the S/M community is, at times, overwhelmingly geeky. Players will spend hours and days debating finer points of flogging safety instead of just getting together and having fun.”

Given the lack of law-breaking and general air of wholesomeness in the S/M scene, it’s no wonder that Jack and Jill Suburb have come to join the fun. The question is, what gets lost in the translation when S/M values begin to percolate into the white-picket-fence world of middle America?

Outside the community, S/M has become what SOJ orientation director Maryann Brown jokingly calls “stand and model.” There are vinyl bodices and soft purple floggers for frustrated housewives, nipple clamps for uptight businessmen and leather-and-studs erotica for teenagers who have read all the romance novels at B. Dalton. People are dressing up and acting out, some say, but they aren’t really freeing themselves or challenging the social norms that say sex should be labeled, contained and neutralized. Put another way, the mainstream offers S/M practice without S/M theory.

Why can’t S/M theories of power and consent catch on in the same way that latex skirts and spiked collars have? Because real inquiries into power might well lead one to question authority outside the bedroom. Newly acquainted with the liberating notion of consent, people may balk in situations where theirs is not given. Workers familiar with S/M theory, for example, might suddenly yell “red!” and walk off the job when their bosses force them to engage in labor they did not consent to perform. Ideally, power in the S/M community is given consensually, not taken by force. When power and consent go hand in hand, people are far less likely to sit back and accept what the powers that be tell them to do.

But gentrification has taken the social challenge out of S/M. And many S/M community leaders like Elizabeth worry that shopping-mall S/M will actually result in dangerous sexual de-skilling: people buying toys that they don’t know how to use and injuring themselves or their partners. Or worse, people could attempt sex games they’ve read about, but, without the ability to communicate consent, end up reproducing all the ugly realities of a sexual culture still based on coercion, secrecy and shame.

For those who delve into the S/M community to learn sexual theories as well as where to buy some hot cock shackles, there’s much more to S/M than sex. It’s about forming a community where bourgeois prudery doesn’t rule all, and sexual expression is articulate, graceful and consensual. Ruth, a player in the scene for roughly four years, confirms that “there’s more to the scene than play. These are people with whom I can be myself. I don’t have to worry that talking about sex will offend them. I don’t have to be afraid to hug them. I have much better friends now than I ever did before.”

Sexuality is, finally, about forging community and cementing human connections through pleasure. Maybe in S/M theory — which has not yet been completely gentrified — we discover that human relationships are really the point. And that’s why power must be used so carefully.

Strip club row on Broadway runs through the middle of North Beach, a neighborhood famous for old beatnik happenings and Italian immigrant culture. Today it’s an upscale nightspot and tourist destination full of swank bars, cafes and expensive Italian restaurants. The most famous strip club landmark has disappeared: The Condor, now a sports bar, once featured an enormous nude woman with red flashing light bulbs for nipples. Now only fancy neon letters remain.

After swooning over a plate of creamy tiramisu in North Beach, Annie, Lisa and I ventured up Broadway in search of the kinds of naked women that the Condor no longer advertises.

At the Casbah, two extremely female women barkers informed us that if we’d brought “a gentleman,” we’d have gotten in for free. Suddenly we’d entered a world where, anachronistically, women were called ladies and men were called gentlemen.

We pushed through a heavy curtain and into a small, dark room. A low stage dominated the dim, mirrored interior, surrounded by a handful of men in chairs. Off to the right, a shabby row of doorways stretched down a hallway. “Lap dances $20,” read a plastic sign.

Although all the club’s patrons were male, they barely noticed us as we sat down. Music throbbed meaninglessly in the background as we watched several women do their acts. To show appreciation, audience members placed dollar bills on the edge of the stage. Everyone who stripped was available for lap dances.

Strippers crawled and writhed on the floor, spreading their legs and interacting playfully with the audience. Some dancers would allow their bodies to be touched — usually in the context of tipping. The dancer would stroke her chosen patron’s face, fold his dollar bill carefully, put it between his lips or thighs and slowly pull it out with her mouth.

We were drawn to the dancers who played with the audience — they seemed more authentically erotic. When a blond calling herself Kiki rolled all over the stage in vintage leopard-pattern lingerie, we looked at one another and nodded excitedly: She was the one we wanted.

“Will you give us a dance?” I asked Kiki when she had finished.

“I promised that gentleman over there a dance first,” Kiki said, looking across the stage where a clot of men were talking. “But I’ll do you first. I’d much rather dance for ladies than icky old men.”

We piled into one of the tiny wooden booths, barely able to fit, and closed the short curtain behind us.

When the music began, Kiki took off all her clothes, first snuggling into Lisa and Annie’s laps, and then rubbing up against me. But our positions seemed awkward, so Annie and Lisa stood up. As they joined me to make a circle around Kiki, we all started to dance and touch each other as we stroked our dancer’s naked body. Kiki seemed surprised. “This is really fun,” she said, giggling along with us. “I’ve never done this before.”

For a few sweaty minutes, the dark club evaporated. We danced with a beautiful, naked woman, sharing her body and surrounding her half-protectively with our own. It was erotic and innocent, a fulfillment of all my high school crushes on girls who would dance with me but never admit there might be anything sexual behind our sororial intimacies.

When we left the club later, I saw Kiki emerge from a back room dressed in a puffy white parka and jeans. Already she was melting back into my high school fantasy.

Lisa and I continued our Broadway adventures the following weekend. This time we brought our friends Dana and Dave, and my partner Jay. We rationalized that the men wouldn’t compromise our experience because they were in the minority.

Centerfolds is a huge three-story club featuring dozens of different lap-dance “fantasy” rooms decorated with couches, beds, office desks and even showers. There’s also a bizarre “Psychedelic Ride Room,” fitted out with a soft couch, fluorescent beads, flower stickers and a “make love not war” sign. In the world of stripping, the ’60s have become just another sex fantasy. Perhaps, for many people, that’s what the ’60s were about all along.

When we found the main stage, a woman with a labia piercing was threading a dollar bill into the small hoop that sparkled in her vagina, undulating on her back and spreading her legs. Everyone clapped and hooted as she stood back up, the dollar bill remaining in place like a bow decorating the present that was her nude body.

I wanted to escape again to the dreamy place that Annie, Lisa and I had shared with Kiki at the Casbah. I suddenly understood what people meant by sex addiction: The urge to abolish this surreal scene in a crush of naked bodies overcame me like drug-lust.

Dave stayed behind and watched the stage as Jay, Dana, Lisa and I searched for some willing ladies. A woman in a clingy evening gown draped herself over Jay’s shoulders. “Wanna dance?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied for him, “but we want another lady too.” At that moment, the woman who had done the dollar-in-the-labia dance walked past us. I touched her arm and asked if she’d be our second. Both women seemed nonplussed as we bartered a price, finally agreeing on $60 for each of them.

The presence of women in our group didn’t seem to make the dancers any more enthusiastic about the deal. Based on Kiki’s reaction to us the week before, I’d begun to imagine we were special, a welcome female respite from the usual “icky old men.” Here at Centerfolds, however, I was no better than an icky old man.

My misgivings evaporated when our dances began, but not because I thought our hired companions liked it. Their lack of interest wasn’t tragic, after all. It was professional.

The strippers pushed Lisa and Jay down on the velvet bed in our “fantasy room,” mounted them, and began to writhe as the song commenced. Dana and I gave each other mock lap dances in the dim light, bumping against each other and the bed.

When it was our turn, I began to feel like I was on ecstasy or, less appealingly, an erotic amusement park ride. As my friends watched, the dancer pulled off my shirt and bra and grabbed my breasts.

“How was it?” Dave asked, regarding our flushed faces as we rejoined him.

“Pretty amazing,” I said dazedly. “Do you want to try one too?”

“No, I don’t think so — it’s all very erotic, but I just don’t think I could have an orgasm. I’m turned on by the idea that a woman really likes me, and I can’t see getting that here.” Dave paused, smiling a little bit. “But I’m enjoying myself. The women are beautiful, and you can’t argue with beauty.”

Later that week, Lisa and I were still pursuing strippers. On Friday, we met Dana and her boyfriend Ian at the famous Mitchell Brothers Theater on O’Farrell Street. Hovering on the edge of downtown San Francisco at a busy intersection, the Mitchell Brothers Theater advertises itself as a high-class “gentlemen’s club” where live sex acts are part of the entertainment.

As if to distinguish itself from the dark clubs on Broadway, the Mitchell Brothers Theater is all brass and glass in its well-lit lobby. With its plush carpet, backlit photographs of “the ladies” lining the walls, and an ever-present, uniformed staff of well-groomed young men, it reminded me of a hotel.

Lisa and I arrived early and walked down a hall lined with curtained lap-dance booths, finally finding ourselves at the intersection of two rooms cloaked in the usual strip-show shadows. As we paused uncertainly, a middle-aged man appeared out of nowhere. “So are you here to watch the ladies or to meet people?” he asked, wriggling close to us with a smile that was a little too hungry.

We were so startled by his invasive cruising that neither of us had time to answer before two dancers, their arms around each other’s waists, warbled cheerfully, “Hey, are you guys together?”

“We’re together,” I gestured at Lisa and myself, pointedly excluding the cruiser.

“Well, so are we!” exclaimed one of the women, “Do you want us to give you a little show?” As we smiled and said no, the man disappeared behind us. Moments later, the dancers followed him.

We sank into some seats next to the main stage and Lisa whispered, “I think those women just saved us.” I nodded numbly, looking across the stage into the leers of three young men in suits who looked like they’d just driven up from Silicon Valley.

Although we’d grown accustomed to being the only women in the audience at a strip club, something about the Mitchell Brothers Theater was different. The only bathroom for women had to be opened with a key by a clerk at the front desk. We’d been in far sleazier clubs, but there was a strange, menacing atmosphere here that we hadn’t felt before.

Even the music at Mitchell Brothers was unsettling. While most strip clubs we’d seen had featured pop music, here every song was slow and soulful. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” played while strippers writhed, groveled and posed — never dancing. A DJ was calling out each woman’s name as she came on stage, urging us to pay particular attention to her “exotic charms.”

“Hey gentlemen and LADIES, let’s show the girls some appreciation!” the DJ barked. I fumbled in my wallet for one-dollar bills.

Seconds later, the DJ spoke again. “Hey LADIES,” he growled, “Let’s start tipping!”

We were the only “ladies”; he was clearly talking directly to us. Most of the men at the edges of the stage hadn’t started tipping either. But I put several dollars down anyway, wanting, for a panicked moment, just to blend in.

After finding Dana and Ian, we entered the “Copenhagen Room,” where patrons crowd onto carpeted benches in a dark alcove filled with flashlights to illuminate the show. Two dancers swirled into the room, utterly naked, and chirped sweetly, “Presents? Presents? Do you have presents for us?” Everyone threw dollar bills on the floor as one woman propped her foot on the wall over my head and the other licked her pussy a few inches from my face. We aimed our flashlights at their spread legs, keeping our own bodies in darkness.

Two men dressed head to toe in Old Navy sporting gear started groaning and yelping “Hey boys, give them more money!” The dancers ignored them.

The Old Navies started hooting again; they sounded like sports fans cheering for a strange new game. “Give them money!” None of the other men in the room were behaving like that. Without thinking, I aimed my flashlight at the faces and bodies of the Old Navies, revealing that despite their grunting, they had given no money yet.

When the show ended, I wanted to get a lap dance and go. We returned to the main stage and watched as a dancer named June strutted to the tune of Radiohead’s “Creep.” While this song seemed a weird choice for a strip — it’s about a loser pervert with an unrequited crush — it made June’s performance into a subtle form of revenge on the audience.

We wondered aloud if she had chosen her song with an intentional sense of irony. There was one easy way to find out.

When June and I were alone in a plush Mitchell Brothers booth, I discovered why the activity in this club seemed simultaneously more raw and yet more secretive. A tidy rack next to me contained condoms, lube and rubber gloves.

“So you want a dance, right?” asked June when I gave her a twenty. “I haven’t done a dance in a long time. This isn’t really a strip club — it’s a sex club.”

“You mean women here normally do more …” I trailed off uncertainly, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

“Yes, some of the women here will have sex,” she replied matter-of-factly.

I tried to process this information as she cuddled me, blew in my ear and gave me the most erotic lap dance I’ve ever had. When it was over, I was shaking with a combination of nervousness, arousal and shock. I wanted something more.

“Did you play the song ‘Creep’ when you danced to be ironic?” I blurted out as she readjusted her corset.

“Yeah, I did. Usually people don’t notice.” At that moment I realized what was provoking my mixed emotions. June was the kind of person I’d normally try to befriend or date in the far-away world of real life. She was smart and self-aware, and had chosen to make sexuality central to her work. I liked her.

Then I did something I had never done before with any of the dancers I’d paid. I told her I was writing a story about strip shows and asked what she thought about that, especially since I wasn’t a stripper myself.

“I’ve often considered writing something about it, but writing just isn’t my strength,” she replied. “But you’re a woman, so you can see what we go through.”

I wasn’t sure if that was true.

Dana and Lisa joined me for another dance with June. As she started to strip, we gushed about her look and stage performance. After a few minutes, June sat on the sofa and chatted with us about the other dancers she liked at the club, how long she’d been working that day and what a pain in the ass it was to zip into her latex dress. Although she had done as much for us as the women we’d hired in other clubs, June wouldn’t let us pay her for the group dance.

“It didn’t count; we just did girl talk,” she said, waving our money away. “Plus it’s the end of my shift and I was too tired.”

We finally accepted her refusal after our several attempts to pay started to feel rude, but we still felt bad about not compensating her. It was, after all, her work.

At the same time, I appreciated her gesture. It confirmed my sense that in another universe, far away from this club, all of us might have been friends. And yet that sense of potential friendship didn’t inspire any of us to want to “rescue” June from stripping. On the contrary, it proved to us that she didn’t need to be rescued. We thought June was so self-possessed and appealing that we began to wonder aloud about becoming strippers ourselves, and whether any of us could do it as well as she did.

Perhaps this is a story that could only be told in a sex-positive city like San Francisco, where vice cops’ orders are usually to bust people who abuse prostitutes rather than busting prostitutes working on private property.

Regardless, when women go to strip clubs, we get to experience an erotic pleasure that is generally reserved for men alone. And more importantly, we have an opportunity to see that the women who choose to strip for a living are more like us than we might imagine — not because all women are whores, but rather because all women should be allowed to make their own choices about what they want to do with their sexuality. While it’s true that some prostitutes and strippers are abused, many of them are not. Some women make well-informed decisions when they choose sex work. And while others are forced into the profession for sheerly economic reasons, being forced to do a job that one doesn’t enjoy does not make sex work special. In many ways, sex workers are like hundreds of thousands of other women in the United States today. Poor and disadvantaged women perform undervalued labor like waitressing, sweatshop manufacturing and housework all the time but rarely do people wring their hands over it or try to save them. Often those who condemn the idea of paying for sexual pleasure have no qualms about paying a domestic to clean their toilets and windows.

Ultimately, how much of the confusion and unhappiness associated with sex work comes from the “work” not the “sex”? Looking sex work in the face invites us to question whether we should be more disturbed by the idea of buying someone for sex, or just the idea of buying someone at all.

“I don’t understand your optimism,” an audience member says in an
incredulous tone.

“Actually, I wouldn’t call it optimism,” Henwood responds with a wry
smile. “For me it’s pessimism, since I want capitalism to end.”

Despite these sentiments, Henwood has spent more than a decade devoting himself to an intensive study of why capitalism and its ruling class are stronger than
ever. His newsletter, the Left Business Observer, founded in 1986, is so packed with
detailed research and insights about the goings-on of the free market
that it’s read by everyone from radical Marxists to rabidly
pro-capitalist libertarians. Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor
of the Wall Street Journal, has been roused enough by Henwood’s work to
characterize him as “scum.”

Pearlstine’s invective is proudly blurbed on the dust jacket of
Henwood’s latest book, titled simply “Wall Street” (Verso Press, 1997). A
mind-bendingly exhaustive account of the market in that most fictive and
fetishized of commodities, money itself, “Wall Street” is a masterful
overview (and indictment) of big finance and the wealthy rentier class
whose “labor” consists of trading stocks, bonds, futures, currencies
and the latest mutant spawn of the derivatives market. Written in the
language of finance theory, statistics and political economy, “Wall Street”
is like a “Satanic Verses” for the creditor set. Henwood speaks a kind of
financial blasphemy, using the sacred wisdom of capital against itself.

Between lectures at UC-Berkeley and Seattle,
Henwood took some time to relax and chat with me about how he came to be
one of the few Marxist economists ever to appear on CNN. “I hope my
work is participating in cultural subversion,” he cracks, “because I’ve
spent all this time studying stuff that I hate — I have to read IMF
reports and bourgeois economists. Wall Street is populated by some of
the most cynical, greedy bastards on earth. But it’s not enough just to
say that. The last thing I want to do is sound like a guy on a soapbox
moralizing. It’s not their personal moral characteristics that create
the system they populate. Capitalism is essentially an amoral system
based on exploitation. And Wall Street is part of the class struggle,
to use an unfashionable term. But most people don’t realize this, so
the market looks incomprehensible to them.”

Henwood came to be the renegade conscience of the bull market by a
rather unusual route. Growing up with the baby boom in a quiet New
Jersey suburb, he became infatuated with conservatism his senior year in
high school. “Bill Buckley and Milton Freedman were my heroes,” he
recalls. “When I got to Yale in 1971, I joined the Party of the Right,
which at the time seemed very exciting.” But after a year of intense
conservatism and what Henwood calls “caveman sexual politics,” he grew
disenchanted with the right wing. “Basically I fell in with a gang of
corrupt hedonists and became an English major.”

Despite his predilection for American literature, Henwood couldn’t seem
to stray far from the politics of the marketplace. “After college, I
got a job at a crappy little brokerage firm on Wall Street, formed by a
Bell Labs physicist who wanted to apply mathematical models to the stock
market. He and his gang of reject brokers were running this place,
which eventually went under.” In the introduction to “Wall Street’,” Henwood
describes how his experience at this firm formed his first impression of
Wall Street as a place run not by the rules of freedom, but by force.
“One morning riding the elevator up to work, I noticed a cop standing
next to me, a gun on his hip,” Henwood writes. “I realized in an
instant that all the sophisticated machinations that went on upstairs
and around the whole Wall Street neighborhood rested ultimately on
force. Financial power, too, grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

But Henwood did not begin to record his thoughts on the coercive power
of money until he dropped out of a Ph.D. program in English, where he
had been tackling a dissertation project about narcissism in American
literature. Fascinated by psychoanalysis, and intrigued by the idea
that modernist poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive,
Henwood kept trying to draw parallels between the worlds of aesthetics
and speculative finance.

Finally, after working for several years in New York writing indexes
for medical textbooks, Henwood was struck by an idea. “I was reading
Rock ‘n Roll Confidential, an eight-page newsletter, and I thought, “I
could do one of these!” While I had been doing my dissertation, I read
the business press a lot, along with Marxian economics, so I had spent
quite a few years immersing myself in financial matters. I thought I
had developed enough expertise to tell the world.” A friend designed a
logo for the Left Business Observer (whose masthead reads “accumulation
and its discontents”), and Henwood sent out the first 200 copies for
free — “some to famous people,” he grins.

Although he is a self-taught economist, Henwood immediately gained
attention for his outspoken, educated perspective on topics so murky
that even high-paid investors find them difficult to articulate. “Within two days I got a call from Victor Navasky [publisher of the
Nation], who wanted me to come down and meet him,” Henwood recalls. Later,
with favorable reviews from progressive journalist Christopher Hitchens
and a plug from Alan Abelson of Barron’s, the Left Business Observer
hit its stride. Henwood became the media pundit to call when
markets were collapsing. “If the TV producers start calling me,” he
laughs, “it’s time to buy.”

“One of the reasons I started the newsletter was that I thought most
leftist economic theory was really dull or out-of-touch. But then the
journalism was all of a moral exhortatory style. I wanted some
combination of being aware of history and theory, mixed with a
journalistic engagement with the present. I really do admire the
scientific method; I admire the whole mode of investigation which you
might call institutionalized skepticism.” It’s this devotion to
scientific rigor and skepticism that shapes the LBO’s content, which is
often illustrated by charts, graphs and statistical calculations. You
won’t find any foamy predictions of spontaneous revolution in its pages,
nor will you find wishful screeds about how the stock market is just a
weird but irrelevant growth on the body of the “real” economy. You
will, however, find clear explanations of why bonds become more valuable
when interest rates drop; investigative reports on the so-called “social
investment” strategies of firms like Working Assets; and informed
coverage of everything from why the Mexican stock market collapsed to
the latest census statistics on race and work.

Henwood is skeptical of accepted wisdom on both the left and the right.
“One of the most embarrassing inheritances of Marxism is the idea that
the system has to collapse inevitably into our waiting arms. It’s a
substitute for politics. If you assume there’s a scientific
inevitability, then you don’t have to do anything.” This lesson — that
there will probably be no inevitable flaming demise for capitalism in
our near future — became hair-raisingly obvious to Henwood during the
1980s savings and loan disaster and accompanying stock market crash. “In
1987, I thought that the crash was the end of the world,” Henwood says
ruefully. “I thought it was the beginning of another depression.
That’s why I’m so measured now. When the depression didn’t happen in
the late ’80s, that made me really rethink why it didn’t, and I came to
appreciate the power of state bailouts.”

Bailouts are on Henwood’s mind right now, as he prepares a series of his
recent essays for a possible new book with Verso Press. “Wall Street” has
sold more than 20,000 copies, a gargantuan run for the small, progressive publishing house, and Henwood’s editor is eager for more.

Although he’s leery of making market predictions — it would make him too
much like the market analysts he loathes — Henwood is clear about what he
thinks are bad economic choices. Privatizing Social Security, as he
explains in “Wall Street,” is a “horrible” idea; it will likely result in
smaller Social Security checks for the poor, which will get even smaller
when the market is shrinking.

And the idea that we can improve the financial market through
socially conscious investing (à la Ben & Jerry’s or the Body Shop) is
also flawed. There is almost no way to engage in large-scale corporate
production and not deal with supposedly “bad” industries like logging
and steel. After all, to choose just one example, Ben & Jerry’s needs
cardboard for its ice cream containers and metal for the chairs in
its shops. Ben & Jerry’s may be buying brownies from Vermont collectives, but
ultimately it’s also dealing with clear cutters when it buys
thousands of yards of cardboard containers for Chocolate Brownie ice
cream.

“Back in the ’80s I used to play the market in stocks and options,”
Henwood admits. “I actually made quite a lot of money in the crash, but
after that I sold all my stocks. What money I’ve got now — which isn’t
much — is in government bonds. Ethical investment is just like military
justice. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“No activity under capitalism is undertaken unless you can make money at
it,” Henwood notes. “Markets are political institutions
in the broadest sense — they’re about organizing ownership and control.
Through the bond markets, a small number of investors control public
policy, and through the stock markets, the same small group exercises
control over corporate policy. One might conclude wrongly that you can
separate ‘virtuous production’ out of all this. But you can’t.”

As for the future of capitalism as we know it, Henwood is cautious. He
admits we’re in a time of unprecedented flux, but isn’t about to suggest
where this might lead us. “The great bull market of 1982 is at best in
its late phases. Earlier this year it had reached a phase of total
wackiness, with speculative manias and a kind of Ponzi structure. But
then Asia just fell apart. And it’s very hard to point to an external
cause, unlike Mexico a few years ago when interest rates rose and so
Mexico collapsed. You could understand that by traditional methods.
Asia collapsed out of nowhere,” he says. “It shouldn’t have had such a radical collapse, just a minor adjustment. We can see empirically that something went wrong. And yet financial leaders still can’t figure out that unregulated markets are simply by their nature destructive. They want to blame cronyism, not the nature of markets themselves.”

Henwood leans back on the sofa and sighs. My roommate wanders into the
room where we’re talking and offers the latest news about his leftist
punk band, the Christal Methodists. He and Henwood swap tales of the
music underground. This is just another of Henwood’s contradictions: He’s respected in the worlds of finance and punk rock.

But what about the next stage of the free market, of capitalism itself?

Henwood shrugs. “People have realized that something is fundamentally
wrong, but they don’t want to take the next step and control capital and
regulate. No one really knows what re-regulation would look like, who
would do it or what political forces would be mobilized. There’s a
sense that the old order is dying but there’s nothing new being born
yet.”

If not graduate school, then what? Oblivion.

In retrospect, I realize I had convinced myself that being a graduate student was an end in itself, a destination rather than a temporary stopping-off zone on my way to something else. My inexperience, combined with Berkeley’s academic insularity, encouraged my fantasy of everlasting graduate school. Especially these days, when graduate students are expected to teach and publish before they earn their degrees, a professorship really is just graduate school with better pay.

The further along I advanced in my program of study, the clearer it became that most of my professors lived under the tyranny of the tenure review in the same way I lived under the tyranny of grades. And yet this knowledge had the peculiar effect of blinding me to the fact that I was being trained for a job. I can recall a politically minded classmate demanding in our introductory theory seminar that the professor address what it meant to learn about literature just so we could go out and make money as teachers. His concern — so distant from what I considered real — was easy to ignore in a class devoted to the idea that social reality is only discourse. “What does he mean, make money?” I thought belligerently. “This is about consciousness.” For me at that time, economics was just another metaphor. Because everyone around me behaved as if this were true, as if professorships and tenure were about intellectual vitality rather than salary, it was hard to see how “making money” mattered.

Now, nine years later, that politically minded colleague and I are both unemployed. In the words of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Professional Employment, we have “failed . . . to find the kind of employment for which [we] had presumably been trained.” According to this same committee, we are hardly in the minority. They estimate that 55 percent of people receiving Ph.D.s in English and foreign languages will not find “appropriate” employment as tenure-track professors within a year of receiving their degrees (and some of those students have already been on the market five years, while getting their degrees). As pundits and professors have been saying throughout the 1990s, there is indeed a job crisis in higher education, particularly within the humanities and social sciences.

What’s telling about the recent outcry over this crisis is that the disappearance of traditional academic jobs is largely being mourned by academics themselves. Often, it’s the relatively privileged professors, those with tenure at research institutions, who seem most despondent over my predicament as a victim of the academic job meltdown. Rarely have I seen any public protest from unemployed Ph.D.s or flex-timed adjunct professors. Most of us are too busy commuting to three part-time teaching jobs, or trying to beef up our skill sets by learning Java and HTML instead of Latin and Old English.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s not that the famous tenured radicals such as academic labor activist Cary Nelson speak for us because we are too tired to speak for ourselves. Something else is at work — a system of beliefs that has sent the professorate into melancholia and people like myself into silence and paralysis. Not to put too fine a point on it, this system is as old as the ivory tower itself: It’s known as elitism.

I don’t mean to accuse Nelson and his colleagues of elitism. After all, it’s from his own work and that of other public intellectuals, like professor-cum-Village Voice pundit Michael Birubi and NYU postmodern rabble-rouser Andrew Ross, that I learned the full meaning of the word “elitism” in the first place. What I want to suggest instead is that elitism is still — despite the so-called democratization of higher education — built into the structure of the academy. Ever since the G.I. Bill and affirmative action programs drew a less typically aristocratic population into universities after World War II, campus radicals and liberal social critics have celebrated the potential for higher education to bring intellectual interests in line with more egalitarian ones. And yet earning a Ph.D. in the humanities or social sciences is, at this point, supposedly good for nothing but university teaching. We’re studying and laboring with the antiquated idea that higher education should give back only to itself and not nourish other communities and industries.

Understandably, of course, professors don’t want to see the industry that rewarded them fall apart before their eyes. Having devoted their lives to teaching future scholars and publishing academic work, they’re threatened by the job crisis in academia with feeling like irresponsible mentors. After all, it was under their watch that many talented scholars were downsized. Moreover, as the university system crumbles, so too does their intellectual authority. And therefore, professors who are appalled by the state of their profession continue to recommend reform of the academy: In the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca and dozens of other professional journals, they argue that graduate programs should cease to “overproduce” Ph.D.s; university administrations should stop converting full-time positions into part-time ones; and most of all, state and federal governments should stop cutting back on university budgets.

For Ph.D.s heading into the academic marketplace, however, all these wise recommendations have not, so far, helped us to find jobs in the academy. More important, the elitism that suggests a Ph.D. recipient is only as good as her professorship fosters a crippling sense of shame when we are forced to discuss what are whisperingly referred to as “alternatives” to academic careers. Although our professors clearly mean well, their responses to the job crisis shy away from questioning why we must consider university-level teaching the only appropriate use of our Ph.D.s. Within the sciences, after all, there is no shame attached to leaving academe and pursuing a career in industry.

Why do we in the humanities and social sciences cringe when told that we may have to use our knowledge in that place we jokingly call “the real world”? Beneath all the wry remarks lurks the knowledge that we’re being kept out of the intellectual frat house. Without entree into the land of learning for learning’s sake, the academic identity seems not only worthless, but ostentatiously faked, like counterfeit money printed on construction paper. Those feelings hit me hard when I realized that I would be joining the ranks of Ph.D.s graduating without professorships. Like some sort of addict, I had been in denial about my little problem until one night when I found myself curled into a fetal position on the floor of my lover’s bedroom, naked, crying and shivering uncontrollably. Melodramatically, I imagined that I had become the living dead. Having somehow survived my own demise, I was doomed to walk the earth like an intellectual corpse, my knowledge gradually rotting away.

It was all made so much worse by my having spent my entire life preparing to be Professor Newitz. I did everything to make myself into a ragingly proficient scholar. While teaching and writing my dissertation, I also published articles in prominent journals, co-edited a widely publicized anthology of essays for an academic press, presented my research at national conferences and incorporated a small educational nonprofit organization that promotes the critical use of new and alternative media. My work was considered such an unusual example of graduate scholarship that I was profiled in Lingua Franca’s Real Guide to Grad School. And yet, although I interviewed over a period of three years at a number of excellent universities, no job offers materialized.

I watched similarly qualified job candidates have the same experiences and try vainly to keep their spirits up. We found creative ways to be polite about what was happening. Rather than asking, “Did you get a job?” one would inquire, “Will you be here next year?” (i.e., “Are you unemployed and therefore not moving to another university town to work?”) Walking around in my newly zombified state, I finally got sick of all the humiliating pleasantries and began asking people what they were going to do. “Really, I have no idea,” said one unemployed colleague who had been awarded the department’s top fellowship when she entered the program. “Perhaps I’ll go into the music industry.” Two of my fellow graduates are heading down to Hollywood to break into scriptwriting. One is going back to law school; another is temping while he continues to lead a reading group on Marxist theory. Our tales of woe and financial uncertainty are apparently so universally poignant that they’ve even been given the Gen X twist in a Spin article about Ph.D.s with crappy jobs.

But I’m not so sure we need to be hauling out the Sturm und Drang just yet. The problem is not our so-called crappy jobs; it’s an educational system that teaches us to think we are not proper intellectuals unless we are employed as academics. Why should my colleagues and I be ashamed to take our considerable knowledge and work as writers, designers, administrators, researchers and teachers outside academia? Why should our worth as scholars be measured in tenure tracks?

In theory, everyone in the United States has the right to be educated. And yet, rather undemocratically, we continue to isolate education (and the educated) in certain elite institutions, effectively eliminating the possibility that useful ideas developed in the academy will ever reach a public that truly needs them. Being more educated than other people does not mean we should escape the real world. We should use our education to change the world for the better rather than hiding from it.

It’s only within the past few years that organizations like the Modern Language Association have suggested that graduate programs in the humanities prepare students for nonacademic jobs. In part, their previous reluctance to make this recommendation has perpetuated the silence of recent Ph.D.s like myself. We’ve been too ashamed to speak up because once we leave campus, our nonacademic lives become Careers That Dare Not Speak Their Names, reminders that academia is as much about getting a job as it is about smarts. But now that the job crisis clearly isn’t going away, graduate programs will have to rethink the role of Ph.D.s in the “real world.” It is imperative for graduate students to understand that becoming a professor is only one of many careers they might pursue with their advanced degrees.

During my less apocalyptic moments, I’ve become somewhat gleeful thinking about Ph.D.s pouring into Hollywood, writing sly sitcom scripts and weirdly symbolic movies of the week. I like the idea of teachers at Heald Business School who have studied class consciousness in American poetry, lawyers who have analyzed the humor of sexual transgression in literary obscenity trials and technical writers who have explored the way information technologies change the way we use language. These are the people whose higher education is relevant to their lives, despite the fact that their experiences fall outside the purview of university curricula.

What I want, finally, is for Ph.D.s to be proud of what they’ve learned, not because they’ve been granted the title of professor, but because they’ve done something useful with their minds. Likewise, I hope that professors will come to appreciate that all teaching does not have to end in the production of more professors. We should not be wringing our hands over the loss of tenure-track jobs, but trying instead to build an honorable tradition for thinkers who work outside the university system.

Although my despair over the loss of an academic future has begun to wane, and I’ve found work as a freelance writer, I finally realized that I had to leave Berkeley. Every campus building and student-clogged cafe made me feel like I was watching an ex-lover flirt with other people as if nothing were wrong between us. So I moved to San Francisco. Now it takes me over an hour and a half on public transportation to get to the place I thought of for 10 years as my refuge, my true community, my raison d’être. Like everyone who has ever been in a dysfunctional romantic relationship, I had to learn new boundaries. UC-Berkeley became a place I would visit only when I was offered something concrete, like a part-time lectureship. No more would sweet promises and false hopes lure me back.

Except, of course, if the offer were good enough. I’m still infatuated with research, still solicit the occasional teaching position. I’ll even confess to being on the market again this year, looking for academic jobs. This time I’m seeking many other types of employment, too: I know my intellectual dignity does not rest on being called professor. And yet no matter what happens, I suppose I will always foolishly, perhaps even self-destructively, adore the university like a first lover, who broke my heart but taught me the true meaning of seduction.