Have you ever listened to a conversation in a foreign language? That’s what sexual fetishes are like. They’re exciting if you speak the language. If you don’t, you’re left watching two people make noises with your mouth, your brain struggling to pattern-match their syllables against some meaning until eventually you give up.

I don’t find BDSM interesting, so much of Venus in Furs is a conversation in Putonghua or Sundanese. After I gave up trying to follow the conversation, I looked for a story, and there wasn’t much of one.

It’s a book within a book. A man reads a text about a “supersensual” man, Severin von Kusiemski, who falls under the spell of a woman with the South Park-sounding name Wanda von Dunajew. She wears furs. She captivates him – literally. He wants to be her slave. They go away on adventures together. The tone of the book feels like cordial that’s on the verge of fermenting into poison: a fantasy pushed as far as it can go.

Venus in Furs contains frank descriptions of a lot of things that would not have names for decades to come. It’s also unfocused, and suffers from the curious comorbidity of too much and not enough. The plot’s repetitive, with events looping around like a 12 inch record caught in a groove. But von Sacher-Masoch keeps adding in all these asides about metaphysics and gender roles and paganism, throwing the novel’s forward momentum into a talespin.

Sacher-Masoch likes to set up bowling pins and then forget to knock them down. Partway through the story, a few black female slaves assist Wanda in humiliating Severin. Could that have led to a reflection on real bondage? And the shallowness of what he experiences with Wanda? After all, Severin can reclaim his freedom and dignity whenever he wants, whereas some people can’t. BDSM’s just a fantasy, which is good in real life, but in a fictional book, why couldn’t he have gone beyond fantasy? Why not talk about real bondage? Venus in Furs dwells obsessively on saccharine instead of real sugar.

Apparently in BDSM there is a concept called “topping from the bottom”, where the submissive person uses the fact of their submission as collateral to manipulate or control the dominant. “I gave up my freedom for you. You really owe me, so let’s run this relationship on my terms.”

I’m the furthest thing from an expert, but Severin seemed like he was topping from the bottom a lot. One of his first acts is to make Wanda sign a contract of his servitude, stating among other things that she must always wear her furs. This adds a false, insincere dynamic to their relationship: like putting someone in chains and giving them the key. It’s like von Sacher-Masoch was topping me from the bottom. The book lures you in with the promise of revelation, intimacy, and one man exposing his secret heart. He immediately starts offloading mountains of ruminations on gender roles and metaphysics and paganism. This book could be subtitled “Dear Diary.”

The fetish-as-language metaphor breaks down. When you hear an unfamiliar language, the problem is that you don’t understand it. With a sexual fetish, you understand it perfectly well, it just has no meaning. After it’s possible to learn a new language, but I don’t know that it’s possible to learn a new fetish. If you can, Venus in Furs is no Berlitz Easy Language course.

CS Lewis wrote fantasy. He also wrote this line: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important,” but that’s a fantasy too. It’s easy for Christianity to be false and moderately important, since believers are using its tenets to modify their behavior – or they say they do? In practice, many Christians practice secular, liberal morality, usually some kind of utilitarianism/consequentialism. There’s a whole generation of Christians who seem functionally identical to atheists, except they go to church.

Some would ask: if believers and non believers do exactly the same things, what’s the value of “Christianity” even being in the picture? What’s the point of accepting a supernatural framework of God, Son, Holy Ghost, sola scriptura et cetera if it leads you to do the exact same thing you’d do anyway? It’s like praying because the battery in your car went flat, and receiving divine word that you must go to Supercheap Auto.

That’s a good question. I think that consequentialist morality as practiced by a Christian is still arguably superior to consequentialist morality as practiced by an atheist. Or at least, it’s different. The answer is found in prisoner’s dilemma.

Two prisoners (in separate rooms, working independently and without the other’s knowledge) have the choice to either cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, they get a small reward. If both defect, they get a small punishment. If one defects and the other cooperates, the defector gets a big reward and the cooperator gets a big punishment. It’s a simple game and although it’s possible to overapply it, it’s an important part of understanding altruism and partnership.

The key insight of prisoners’ dilemma is that it’s impossible to lose by defecting. No matter what your opponent does, you’ll at least get the same outcome as him. The only way “cooperate” can be a good strategy is if a), the game is iterated, with round after round, so that a cooperator has a chance to punish a defecting partner b), exists and competes in an ecosystem of prisoners. Two players who defect 100% of the time will have an equal score at the end, but they’ll still have “lost” relative to prisoners in the next cellblock who co-operate 100% of the time, reaping massive rewards.

Robert Axelrod’s famous experiments found that the optimal strategy in most cases is “tit for tat” – that is, cooperate on your first move, and thereafter copy your opponent’s last move. In other words, assume honesty, immediately punish defectors, but be prepared to forgive. The essence of tit for tat is found in Theodore Roosevelt’s line on diplomatic policy: “speak softly, and carry a big stick”.

But a key part in finding the optimum strategy is to ask “how long is the game? Is it 10 iterations? 20 iterations? An unknown number of iterations?”

And that’s where atheists and Christians break ranks. Atheists believe that the game has a limited number of iterations. That is, eventually you die, and then you’re no longer playing prisoners dilemma. You can’t punish defectors, or reward cooperators, or do anything at all. The game’s just…over.

Imagine someone who lives his life, and, moments before death, defects in a massive way. Tit for tat doesn’t work. There’s simply no way to punish him. Look at the Columbine kids – they defected because they knew they had a way to escape the game and its consequences – two bullets between the teeth.

For Christians, it’s different. Their prisoners dilemma game has infinite iterations.

Eternal life or eternal damnation is much the same motivator in any faith: it’s a prisoners dilemma game that doesn’t end. You can’t escape, or weasel out. This fundamentally changes things.

I wonder how many would-be murderers have stayed their hand because they were afraid of hell. Probably quite a few.

In practice, this doesn’t mean Christians are going to act like they’re playing an infinitely long prisoners dilemma game. And lots of atheists act like they’re playing neverending prisoners dilemma (some of the transhumanist bent believe that the dead will someday be reborn by nanotechnology or some other means. It’s sort of like the game pauses and them resumes after a coffee break.) But the motivators are there, and if humans aren’t acting rationally, that’s their problem.

This is why I think Christian morality is distinct and perhaps superior to secular morality even if God isn’t real, worms eat us after we die, and Golgotha was never anything but a rubbish tip.

Legendary Amazon mega-reviewer Harriet Klausner has passed away. I assume she’s leaving loved ones behind. My condolences.

She embodied everything wrong with criticism, both at the professional and amateur level (it’s unclear which class she belonged to). For people who mistrust online reviews, for people who assume it’s all just an incestuous, payola-greased web of marketing, cross-promotion and buddy-buddy backslapping, Harriet Klausner is Exhibit A. She is the smoking gun, with a complementary five star review on Amazon.

31,014 reviews, largely of romance novels. 99.7% of these reviews had four or five star ratings. She reviewed everything, and loved everything, but it’s clear that she didn’t read everything. Someone wrote a book that (strategically?) included a character called “Harriet Klausner”, but her obligatory glowing review made no mention of this. There’s also the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Her reviews had a nebulous, creepy quality, like they were written by a computer. She was the queen of vague adjectives, vapid cliches, and rewritten cover blurbs. Have you seen the video where rapper will.i.am has bullshits his way through an explanation of logos and branding? That video is Harriet Klausner’s entire life for the past fifteen years.

She was so prolific and so worthless that for years there were conspiracy theories about Klausner – that she didn’t exist, and was an account controlled by a shadowy cabal of publishers. In the end, it was confirmed that she was a real person, which is probably worse. At least a shadowy cabal could conceivably have the manpower to actually read the books. The truth is this (h/t to this guy’s sleuthing): she received large numbers of Advance Reader Copies from publishers. She didn’t disclose that she was getting ARCs (in breach of FTC disclosure rules, but nobody on Amazon cares about that) and she would then re-sell them via a third party (apparently legal, but frowned upon). Books got promoted, Klausner could pay her cat food bills, and everyone won except for the people reviews exist for in the first place.

With Amazon now taking steps to protect the integrity of their reviews, but you wonder if outright grifters are the problem here. The issue seems to be an economic one: reviewers want free shit, publishers and writers want favourable reviews. The actual consumer is very much an externality here – they don’t have a skin in the game, so they just have to hope and pray the reviewer has the integrity not to whore out their opinions to keep the majestic Free Shit River flowing in full flood.

I used to read a metal site called Teufel’s Tomb. While every other metal site had a chummy “support the scene, bro!” ethos, Teufel’s opinion was that 90% of bands, labels, and distros should just eat bullets and die. It was a refreshing attitude. You could trust their opinions.

Someone had the misfortune of interviewing Teufel. The guy was obviously drunk and spent most of the interview pushing the interviewer’s buttons, but he also says some interesting things about “objectivity” while staring down the barrel of payola. “Objectivity, in metal reviews, is to say as much about the music, without saying anything at all. All the bands and record labels want is for you to say things that will help them sell more records. They don’t want you to state an opinion, unless your opinion is positive. Really, objectivity in metal reviews is to simply drone on and on and on about “this is the lyrical subject matter, this is the band line-up, this is the style of music they play, they sound like these bands, you should buy this album if you like these bands.” […] I’ve been on all of the major metal label promo lists, and they all took me off after they actually read that I was stating opinions that some of their releases are just plain boring or sucked.”

Pauline Kael once said “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” To which Harriet Klausner and her spiritual descendants say “why not both?”