The educational objective stated that the presenter would guide participants to a "greater understanding of the personal and often spiritual aspects of BDSM". She was not merely affirming a new normal, but rather a new pathway to spirituality. Note the march of sexual progress: BDSM, which was a perversion or deviation, became normal if practised by consenting adults, and was now vaunted as a pathway to spiritual elevation. Through this cataclysmic shift in sexual morality, we have the "new, new normal": non-pathological, loving and spiritually uplifting acts of bondage, dominance and sadomasochism.

During Molly's journey to this new freedom of expression, she struggled with self-doubt. She wondered whether Martin Luther King would call to her from his grave, "Honey, this isn't what I had in mind when we marched from Selma to Montgomery! " And she expected a very different response from a lesbian feminist friend to whom she confessed, "I feel shame about having a fantasy of being abused by a British sailor. Am I OK?" Instead of the anticipated condemnation, her friend laughingly responded, "You're not OK—but it's fantastic!" The new ethic is: if it feels good to me, if it turns me on, it's a positive social value.

The culmination of Molly's provocative presentation was a video that showed her on all fours—fully clothed to avoid any prurient implications—and facing the camera in order to capture her expressions of sexual satisfaction as various white "masters" whacked her rear end. Nearly all of the 300 sexuality professionals attending this session gave Molly a standing ovation. The audience enthusiastically applauded this celebration of the ultimate human freedom to define one's own sexual pleasure, even if it is in the form of pain and self-degradation.

How did this dramatically changed sexual landscape come about? Two 19th-century thinkers figure prominently in plunging us into the morass: Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American minister and champion of individual freedom and nonconformity, and the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche.

In his essay "Self-Reliance", Emerson was the first notable American intellectual to elevate the individual self as the ultimate arbiter of values: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members . . . Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." (My italics.)

Despite his theological background, Emerson replaced the revealed truths of Christianity with the inner God that he believed dwells at the core of every individual and that must be affirmed personally. If every person sincerely searches within, he or she will confirm the universal truths that Judeo-Christian religion previously asked us to accept on the basis of a higher authority.

Emerson espoused the Transcendentalist belief that people and nature were inherently good, containing a piece of divinity within. Not only was external authority not needed to ensure virtue, but religious and political institutions corrupted the purity of the person. Only allowing self-reliant individuals to discover God within and live in accordance with self-affirmed truth will lead to a harmonious society.